Jon Udell recently mentioned this and the comments and his post are quite useful.  In particular the clarifications around the behavior of Outlook 2007 and the common feed store.

What surprises me is that people consistently seem to think that authenticated RSS is rare, on the Internet maybe – but definitely not in the enterprise.  Although the comments do show that a lot of people and a lot of readers do support authenticated feeds I suspect that most of them will only work with Basic Authentication over SSL.

Rather than continue to throw around th pros and cons of the file server, maybe its better for me to describe the way I prefer to work, which blends the use of file storage (local and server) and SharePoint.  Neither is the total solution. 

Maybe that will help both Joel and I iterate to a better understanding of each others positions.

First off let me say that I have been using SharePoint since version 1 and have used Notes, Quickplace, WebSphere portal and various other collaborative workplaces over the last 10 years and my view of their role is simillar.

I consider SharePoint a great place to publish but not a great place to work,  so here are a few details of how I breakdown working with files and publishing them.

How I work with files:

1. I prefer working with files stored on my local hard drive.  Every application – not just Office – works great with the local file system and its quick, reliable and simple to use.
2. I have pretty much every file I have ever worked on and many reference files on my local file system and I can search the 30,000 files in a flash using X1. In addition I get fast high quality previews of the files I am searching.  In the last 10 years if I had saved files directly into collaborative spaces they would be spread across probably a 100 different workspaces and be impossible to find. 
   — Impossible might seem strong but remember these files would have been scattered across collaborative workspaces from several customers and partners and several of the systems that contained the files have now been decomissioned.
3. I re-use data from old files every day,  I don’toften go back 10 years but I go back 3 years every week.
4. I am really looking forward to Vista’s ability to combine search with tags and other meta-data and again I stress the importance of the ability to work with all my files, across customers and projects.
5. I love the fact that files in my local file system are available almost instantly with no network delays or reliability issues and that I can replicate them easily to my Tablet for mobile working.  I have found replication to be 100% reliable even with plenty of adds, deletes, renames and edits at both ends (obviously not at the same time)

How I backup my files:

1. I backup my files on-site using robocopy to mirror my master file system to another machine each night
2. I backup my files offsite using Iron Mountains connected,  which is fast and very efficient, especially when multiple users have many duplicate files (as it uses a single instance store).  There is a web interface to Connected as well to provide anywhere access (but I have never needed to use it).

How I publish files:

1. When I am ready to share files I need to publish them, if I am working with a small team all sharing a file server, this is really easy – just mirror (or copy) my files up to the file server.
2. Sometimes I use Groove as a way to share files between team members and it works well, but it’s expensive.
3. More often I publish the files to a collaborative workspace and the discontinuity always annoys me,  the fact that I have to browse to a document library and upload the file, or drag and drop it using web-dav, often needing to add document properties.  SharePoint makes this a bit better because it can use property promotion to populate server meta-data from document meta-data. 
4. Sometimes I copy files using web-dav but the poor web-dav integration always annoys me,  I particulary don’t like the fact that web-dav support rarely includes surfacing document properties in the shell or providing right click actions.  Now that most of the functionality in collaborative workspaces is implemented by well defined web services I wish shell extentions could be written that exposed this functionality via Windows Explorer as well as the Browser, much as SharePoint v1 did.

How I publish status:

1. When other people need to track what I am doing I don’t find uploading individual files very useful.  Instead I prefer to post  documents with embedded documents or more often links.  That way I can provide people with access to sets of related files with approporate comments.  Its even better if people can comment back to me.
2. Discussion databases can be used in this way and I often use Notes databases, but I think I have a preference for blogs to provide this function.  Now that SharePoint includes blogs this is a step forward, especially because I can use LiveWriter which allows me to save drafts in the file system and also easily edit previous posts.  Even better LiveWriter keeps track of all of my posts to all of my blogs and because all of its data is in the file system I can replicate it between multiple machines and easily back it up.

How I publish ideas:

1. Blogs are definately my favorite place to publish personal ideas, although I prefer discussion areas for developing ideas.
2. I also like wikis but prefer them for publishing ideas that need collaborative effort over time, for example a process or service definition that I know will evolve.  I am concerned though that wiki content is more difficult to reuse as it gets locked up within a particular wiki.  For someone who is working on many projects having my contribution to each project locked away in a wiki silo is an issue I have not come to terms with.

Team working:

Lots of the comments above touch on team working, but here are some particular notes:

1. When I work with a team on a file server every team member gets a personal working directory.  The owner of it gets READ/WRITE access and all other team members get READ.  This means there is never a risk of conflicts and everyone can easily track everyone elses activity.  This is especially true with search that makesit really easy to aggregate files from across multiple peoples working progress areas.
2. When working with a team across multiple companies, I prefer to use Groove,  the fact that it works offline and syncs in the background well makesit much more likely to be used.  I also like the fact that it provides a multiple tools including a discussion area where people can refine Ideas and post status information.  We sometimes use it to provide a sort of team blog.  Everyone I know who uses Groove wishes it included RSS notifications so that we only had one place to look for change (our RSS readers).
3. When working with a team within the company my preference is to work locally on my desktop and Tablet and publish to a collaborative space at key points, if I am working with a small team I will also write a highlight report with links to documents, blog posts, useful web sites etc.
4. I think RSS will have a huge impact — making it much easier to coordinate activities within and between teams as well as many other scenarios.

In summary I am essentially looking for a more integrated and seamless experience, hesistate to propose solutions because there are people better at figuring these thing out than me but here are some things I have seen and liked. 

1. I really liked the idea of accessing web based document libraries through the windows shell, especially if I have right click menu support for all key actions like check-in/out.
2. I really like the idea of being able to perform actions offline and then have these actions execute transparently when my PC detects that it’s online again.
3. I like the idea of making RSS subscriptions to document libraries and associating them with folders in the filesystem and seeing file enclosures appear as if by magic.
4. I want all change reported to me through RSS and sometimes I want enclosures to be delivered as well. 
5. I want intelligent handling of URLs, ie if I am offline I want them to resolve to local replicas or caches on-line I want the option (Lotus Notes handles this pretty well)
6. I want tags to work across applications and not just at the file system level. 
7. I like the Vista idea that allows applications to register preview, search and property handlers to create a more unified experience
8. I really like the “blog this” concept and would like as many applications as possible to have one click integration into Live Writer or simillar.  That way I have a single place to manage blogs and persist drafts and previous posts
9. I like the idea of Groove but I would like a central Groove server as well so that a star topology was supported for replication as well as a mesh.  Sometimes with small teams individuals working across time zones are not online enough at the sametimes.

• pretty much every application supports storing it’s file based data that way
• everyone knows how to save files
• everyone knows how to navigate a file system
• its easy to tell people where things are,  or send them a UNC path
• its easy to move stuff around, copy it, rename it
• its easy to send files stored in a file system via email (drag and drop)
• search tools work well
• performance is great
• solutions are available for off-line working
• fairly easy to replicate
• well integrated with backup
• integrated with all sorts of applications
• very cheap

With Vista things seem to be going even better for the local file system and promise to get better for the file server with Longhorn server.  In my old post I listed a lot of problems with the file server, and update them now for vista:

• no general purpose way to add meta data – no longer true with Vista’s support for tags
• forces you onto one view of structure, ie only directory hierarchy – tags fix this as well, although you can also sort, group, search and filter on meta-data as well
• not easy to share outside the enterprise, in a controlled way,  although tools like foldershare and groove do it peer to peer through firewalls - this is still true, of course the fact that Several office versions include Groove make it easier and its also possible to get at file system data via OWA in Exchange 2007
• no workflow, or other automation I think this is still true
• no easy way to add comments I think this is still true
• no standard way to version I think this is still true
• only one way to group stuff – directories – tags fix this as well, although you can also sort, group, search and filter on meta-data as well

Vista adds some additional goodies like thumbnails, previews, and property handlers as well as much improved replication, offline working, search and really great support for grouping, filters, sorting etc.

In addition everything works in the file system,  once you move to something else you have to keep asking yourself the question “where should I put this”.

Overall I think the file system is doing pretty well, its certainly my preferred place to work, with the web being my preferred place to publish, although I also like Notes databases (if only doclinks worked more reliably).

Soon though I expect that my favorite place to publish will be a future version of Lotus Quickplace, I saw it’s file system integration today and I was very impressed!

I have recently been thinking a bit about Enterprise RSS and getting frustrated by key features that seem to be missing, confusing or partially implemented, two examples being:

• Lack of unread status syncing between multiple clients of the Windows Common Feed Store
• Lack of support for basic authentication in the Windows Common Feed Store

I have also been thinking more broadly about security and management issues in general, so I was pleased to come across this post on the Collaborative Thinking blog which provided a useful list of topics to consider concerning enterprise RSS, my additions are in bold:

Security

• Ensure support for SSL and related authentication methods
• Ensure support for basic authentication over SSL as well as NTLM and Kerberos (which are mainly of interest in a Microsoft environment only)
• Some way to authenticate to RSS feeds that are protected by forms based authentication, common when enterprise portals are involved
• Browser add-ins should run “Internet zone” or “restricted sites zone”
• Require Windows XP SP2 Attachment Execution Service support
• Ask about block lists, content filtering, and handling of malformed feeds
• Outline how RSS enclosures are managed
• Require ACL’s per feed at group/user levels integrated via AD and LDAP
• Ability to encrypt the feed store and enclosures,  a lot of enterprise data is going to end up in this store, especially if enclosures are used
• I am also interested to see if some form of DRM could be applied to enclosures, with the digital rights acquired for the download user at the same time as the enclosure is downloaded.  I am concerned that enclosure enabled document libraries will result in very efficient document hoarding and resulting data leakage.  This may be a scenario that’s supported by Outlook and SharePoint 2007 IRM,  but I suspect that the common feed store DOES’ NT acquire the rights for the logged on user as part of the download process, which will make it difficult impossible to view the enclosures offline.

De-duping

• Assess how multiple updates to posts are handled and impact to read/unread marks
• Synchronization
• Check to make sure read/unread marks are managed across clients and devices

Storage

• Primarily a concern when feeds are sent into e-mail systems
• Potentially a compliance concern   

Network Utilization

• Assess download schedule management
• IE7 “salting” the interval (is it good enough)
• Is the RSS 2.0 Time To Live (TTL) tag honored
• Use of / support for Incremental feed updates (RFC 3229 (“Delta Encoding in HTTP”))
• Compression of feeds and enclosures

Management

• Ability to associate automatic feed subscription with LDAP directory group memberships, this really is going to be essential if feeds subscriptions becomes important to process compliance, e.g. a person gets informed when their Quality Management System is updated via a RSS feed.
• Ability to track usage

Personalized Feeds

• Not really an easy feature to implement at this time

Attensa and Newsgator seem to be addressing several of these issues,  but Microsoft and IBM don’t so it will be interesting to see how enterprises get on when they deploy Office System 2007 and Notes Hannover.

1. NTLM
2. kerberos
3. Digest
4. Forms based
5. Basic (usually combined with SSL)

Only the last of these mechanisms can be assumed (with any confidence) to work with most desktop RSS readers and often web based readers often don’t even support that. 

The essential issue is that the web pretty much assumes that we can cope with all of these authentication mechanisms because all access is interactive, but with RSS it needs to be automatic and transparent.  The following issues spring to mind:

1. NTLM – so far as I know is only supported by IE 7  and the Vista RSS platform and very few servers,  but if you are a Microsoft shop and are only connecting to SharePoint 2007 then this may work for you
2. Kerberos – same as above, but probably even more demanding
3. Digest – hardly ever used in my experience, either on client or servers, but I may be wrong and has the disadvantage that your username and password will need to be stored somewhere on the client, and many enterprise security policies don’t allow that
4. Forms based – very popular server side, but no chance of supporting this in everyday RSS readers.  I have seen a hack which involves browsing to a web page from within the RSS reader, authenticating, getting the cookie and then synchronising your feeds.   VERY VERY messy
5. Basic with SSL – very widely used, supported by most readers and RSS servers, but has the disadvantage that your username and password will need to be stored somewhere on the client, and many enterprise security policies don’t allow that

This leaves us with a problem.  If you are a Microsoft shop you might get away with a combination of 1,2 and 5.  If not then it looks like it’s time to start lobbying your security policy makers to allow Basic over SSL and local (encrypted) credential storage.

the right information, at the right time, in the right context, has been a holy grail for IT organizations for many years

In his article Mike describes 4 zones (my comments in red):

1. Salient Zone: Information directly relevant to the activity that has the user’s attention and primary focus, or fits a user profile that includes topics the person is interested in (with an implied immediacy in terms of awareness and delivery timeliness).   e.g. Project 1 – changes
2. Peripheral Zone: Information that is strongly-to-moderately associated to a set of activities that the user participates in or to their profile (exclusive of the current activity). While there is likely discretion in terms of how and when the user needs to be aware of the information, there is an implied desire for it to be readily “glanceable”.  e.g. Project 1 and Urgent
3. Ambient Zone: Information users should find interesting but could just as easily ignore. The information could be tertiary, having a no strongly patterned relationship to any activity. But it also might have some intriguing synergy with, or some discernable influence on, activities or other user interests. Communication here is more informal, with user no guarantee that users will divert attention and interact with the information.  Research
4. Nascent Zone:  information forming at its early stages that might have some latent relevancy in the future. Users might be interested in cycling through ever so often as part of general awareness and trend analysis.  Email and general feeds

The problem with the single inbox concept for information is that it provides all 4 types of information in a single stream, and it’s very difficult to cope with this by constantly scanning this stream.  Even when you apply methodologies like GTD, which force you to categorize email and other information it’s still difficult to see just the information you need in every particular context unless you are very organized.

RSS has a better chance than email because it arrives pre categorized, according to the feed title, which most aggregators use to deposit each feed in a separate folder.  Even better most aggregators allow groups of feeds to be placed in additional folders.  These groups of folders if structured around based on context will definitely help.

Consider the following folder structure:

• It allows me to click on Projects, and see all feeds from every project – useful for a daily activity scan.
• Click on Project 1 – changes and I am ready to focus on my Project change board meeting

The beauty of RSS is that once the structure is defined feeds look after themselves.  In addition in tools like Outlook it’s also possible to use flags and search folders to create lists of actions, items, folders with items aggregated by author, by date etc.

IBM are also moving in the direction of context zones with the context being an Activity (for me see here and here), and their activity explorer being the tool I interact with.  The activity concept is very powerful allowing me to associate RSS feeds, emails, IM messages, documents etc with an activity.

In addition there seems to be a general consensus amongst search gurus that search tools will soon be watching what we are doing, how busy we are, who we are talking too etc etc and will be presenting us – non intrusively but proactively - with the information we need from a wide variety of sources, transparently and without forcing us to interrupt we want to.

1. They require an additional step following saving a file to the file system
2. They are slow to upload and download files
3. They often have no off-line support and when they do it’s not a seamless experience
4. Their ability to sort, filter and perform bulk operations is a lot slower than the file system
5. Even if they are integrated with applications, like Office and SharePoint,  they are not very good at supporting the number of file operations I do in a day (hundreds) while I search for documents, copy content from old documents to new ones, pull up reference documents for a few minutes, print extracts from documents etc.
6. None of these things is as much of an issue for published documents, but for work in progress – where there are perhaps multiple versions a day – they are hopeless.

It’s possible that AJAX, increasing network speeds, improved tagging, better support for rapidly previewing document content in web apps might improve things, but for now, the easiest way to share files within an enterprise is a network file system. 

Inter enterprise its interesting to see that Oracle collaboration suite, Groove and now Documentum and probably others that don’t spring to mind have integrated their collaborative workspaces directly into the Windows explorer experience – good move. I have written on related issues before in these posts:

Is the file server dead-

More on file systems, how I work now

1. If you use OnNote you can learn a lot
2. If you are interested in the whole concept of how to use flags to catagorise the content your personal knowledge management system, OneNote can provide some inspiration, although tags also take some beating
3. The most important reason to read this post though – because the OneNote blogs (here, here and here) represent a superb example of how a product development team can use this new media to inform, build a relationship with and take feedback from their community of users and prospective users!

1. It works great offline
2. I can keep an offline replica on all of my PCs and devices and they all sync up nicely so I don’t need to worry about which machine I use.
3. It is well integrated with my calendar and contacts
4. It handles attachments well
5. It works well in the background, it’s very rare I have to wait for it to do something
6. I know that everyone I work with will have access to it and know how to use it
7. Every email has its own initial access control list
8. Good support for groups (distribution lists)

I use Lotus Notes so there are some downsides:

1. No RSS support yet
2. Personal information management workflows are not well supported, for example there is currently no equivalent to the GTD add-in for outlook

However in both of these cases I believe that IBM really understand what’s needed, its just a case of waiting for the next release.

There are many things about wikis, blogs and team spaces that I really like,  but none of them offers all the advantages of email,  so right now they all are useful complements to my collaboration system, rather than at the core of it.

For more interesting posts on this topic, check out these posts:

Permanent Link to Email- The Good Enough Collaboration Tool

The Future of E-mail

Email is critical to Enterprise 2.0 and Office 2.0

There are many small areas where the off-line experience is just not what you would expect,  sometimes only a read-only copy is created, sometimes not all list types are supported, links don’t work – the list of limitations goes on.  Admittedly Colligo – the authors of the blog – make their own tool for offline use of SharePoint but they make no secret of that fact.  Anyway if you think all your off-line issues are met then think again, check out the Colligo blog and the Colligo alternative (Reader and Contributor)and if you want the best Off-line experience it’s probably still Lotus Notes.

It’s interesting though that neither Microsoft nor Colligo make it easy to get a comprehensive and detailed view of what works off-line and what doesn’t and in which products.  some sort of mega table is required, if anyone knows where to find that information please post a comment.

Once assembled you get the chance to decide whether the resulting Keywords, Colleagues, or External Contacts are visible to – Only Me, My Manager, My Workgroup, My Colleagues, and Everyone.  The information is then published into your SharePoint 2007 “My Site”.  Integrating this information into the My Site is a great idea, because it already contains a lot of rich information about you, including – if you choose to keep one – a personal blog as well as AD info about your title, department, manager, group memberships, interests, skills, your picture and your colleagues.

Knowledge Network uses this information to extend the people search capability of SharePoint 2007.  You can find out more information about Knowledge Network from the excellent blog and web site.

If you want a good overview of social networking in general then I recommend this overview from Dave Pollard.

 Many people assume that collaboration comes naturally – provide people with a tool and off they go, unfortunately it’s rarely that easy. Despite the fact that hundreds of books have been written about how to help teams collaborate and how to successfully manage projects, many team leaders lack a simple framework to help them assess the scale and nature of the collaboration challenges that their teams face. Once the challenge is understood teams need practical guidance on where to focus appropriate process and technology improvements.

One approach is to look inwards at the team and the complexity of the task to assess the level of challenge according to four categories (see fig 1).  The first and probably the most important, is the degree of – common ground – shared by team members, teams with a lot of common ground collaborate more naturally together and common ground becomes increasingly important as complexity increases. 

Where you set the dials for complexity and common ground will dictate the relative importance of technology and process readiness. Understanding nature of complexity and the areas where common ground is lacking (the focus of this article) will help you to home-in on the types of technology and process tools that you need to make your team a success (a future article).

The application of this approach is best illustrated by an example; in this case a typical corporate strategy team which is undertaking a regular yearly review cycle. Their review is not particularly urgent, but is complex (see fig 2) because of the interdependence of different tasks, the need to innovate to stay competitive, the number of decisions still to be taken and the need for different stakeholders to negotiate.

The team lacks common ground (see fig 3) in quite a few areas but the fact that they don’t all know each other, will be working virtually across multiple time zones and will need to work both on and offline will be a particular challenge to them given the complexity of their objective.

Initially the team should focus on building the relationship and trust between team members, probably push for a kick off using a professional video conferencing session and concentrate on well facilitated audio conferences while the team members get to know each other. Common access to information will be very important, so the team need to ensure they use an information sharing/discussion system that is available to everyone, is asynchronous and works well off-line, these characteristics are essential and can be achieved even with disciplined use of email and conference calls.

If the team wants to push the boundaries they should consider a web hosted team room with off-line support and also routinely recording their meetings; this will make it easier to create focus, manage information, engage new team members and involve specialist contributors.

Longer term the team members should consider Instant Messaging and Blogs, as these will allow members of the team to get to know each other much better, help them understand each other’s challenges and perspectives and extend the strategy review process throughout the year. 

A refinement to this simple framework is to consider how the needs of the team will evolve over a projects lifecycle, teams need different processes and tools during the storming and forming phase than during the performing stage for example.

Enterprise Web 2.0 Technological Barriers

1. How can I be certain that the information that is gathered and shared behind the firewall stays behind the firewall?

Blogging is part of the communication continuum – Instant Messaging, Email and Blogs. Your employees currently follow a policy to keep some information only “behind the firewall” when using IM and Email. They will need to follow the same rules when it comes to using and sharing information they find with your Enterprise Web 2.0 tools.

I agree with the key point,  but I also think its worthwhile questioning the amount of information that we keep behind the firewall, posting outside the firewall makes it much easier for customers and potential customers to interact with you and also helps build a community with other companies/individuals trying to solve the same problem.  Rod’s blog is an example how how hopefully his company has benefited from the discussion around the use of blogs in the enterprise.  If Rod had only blogged about enterprise blogging behind the firewall I would suspect that his thinking would have been less refined.

2. How do I control who has access to particular levels of information and databases?

Set up a simple 3 layer system. Everyone, Department Only, Project Team. For specific project blogs, set a default access level, and then make exceptions on an article by article basis.

Enterprise blogging tools like WordPress MU can dynamically re-draw pages depending on the viewers access control.

Setting up the read access lists is also fairly easy. The user experience looks like addressing an email.

Again I agree, but it’s worth mentioning that its not just about controlling access, but also about making sure that the people who NEED access actually get subscriptions pushed to them.  For example a Programme Manager needed to be auto-subscribed to the blogs of all of the projects in the programme,  a project manager to all the staff on his project and all his peers within a programme etc.

3. How do I protect the integrity of the information from malicious tampering by disgruntled employees or managers?

You use the wisdom of the crowd combined with audit trails and roll-back features. For example, say you are using Social Text as an enterprise Wiki to document policies and procedures. If an angry employee changed one of the policies, Social Text would keep track of who changed it, what changes they made and when. The group (aka the wise crowd) would be relied upon to catch the error. The employee could then be held accountable for their actions.

It should be noted that most companies have this problem today, but it is actually much more serious. There is no access control over most policy and procedure documents. The docs just sit there on a shared drive, available for hundreds of people to anonymously edit.

And, in today’s environment, there is an even greater risk: without the enhanced search and cross-linking features of blogs and wikis, most employees have trouble getting the information they need when they need it. The result is a high chance for mistakes because people are not familiar with the policies.

I have seen many companies start off worrying about this issue, only to find its very minor and that the mechanisms built into blogs and wiki’s easily provide self governance within the enterprise.

4. How can I be sure that information is being “tagged” properly for efficient retrieval later?

Social tagging works.

Just as the government does not have to enforce a proper price for beer or any other good or service in an open market economy, the knowledge management department does not have to enforce a rigid standard for how things are tagged. People will tag things as they want, and eventually, cultural standards will arrive. See Stu Downes Folksonomy in the enterprise for more proof.

Yes,  in fact as Stu states as the number of people who tag increases above 50 you quickly cease producing unique tags, and 50 people in a community is a viable number in most enterprises

Also, remember that things are not tagged on the open Internet, at least not according to any centrally planned taxonomy, and yet you can still find exactly what you are looking for. You use Google.

After you deploy your Enterprise Web 2.0 solutions, if you are still having trouble finding what you need, buy a Google Mini. The Google Mini doesn’t work all that well in Web 1.0 Intranets, but with all the additional cross-linking that will automatically happen in enterprise blogs and wikis, Google Mini should work just fine.

5. What kind of training do employees need before they can effectively use the technology?

Some employees will need no training. Generally, these will be younger employees and the 5 to 10% who already have a personal blog.

I have recently seen some research that suggests that people in the 35-45 age group tend to be pretty early adopters of many of these technologies. Within an enterprise – as distinct from an academic – context you often find that its this age group rather than the 25-35 group who are the blog and IM users.

Other employees will need fairly extensive training.

Enterprise Web 2.0 Cultural Barriers

6. How can I monitor the system to make certain that what individuals are saying and sharing reflects company policy?

This is less of an issue if you are dealing with Internal only deployments of Enterprise Web 2.0.

Today, you have to deal with this issue when if comes to emails, voicemails, phone calls, instant messages, etc.

The one advantage to Web 2.0 is that if someone puts up something offensive in a Blog, you can take it down. Once an email is sent, if can be forwarded on to millions.

This is also a cultural issue, many companies who allow blogging recognise that whilst there is a risk associated with employees not following company policy, that the benefit of allowing company policy to evolve in response to the opinions of their workforce, customers, suppliers and other interested parties can be very valuable.  Certainly within an enterprise this discussion and debate is even more valuable in a company that is culturally ready for it.

7. What are the legal dangers in saving and sharing so much loosely supervised input?

In some instances, there are serious legal dangers. In a consulting firm, if you promise the client to only share client information with the project team, that information better not be shared with the whole firm.

The best way to address this issue, is to develop a one-page set of rules for employees. Simple guidelines on what they should and what they should not post. The guidelines should be blunt, easy to read, and feel almost like Enterprise Web 2.0 commandments.

Thou shall not flame thy colleagues.

If the legal department helps with crafting the guidelines, along with input from HR, you should be able to minimize the implications of this risk. Note also, that this is a danger in today’s environment. Except you have little to no ability to see who read what on the company’s shared drive. The result is no accountability in today’s systems.

I’m no lawyer but I would imagine that the issues are already addressed in most companies IT acceptable usage policies for email and intranet use.

8. How do I distinguish “productive” use of the technology from horsing around?

How do you distinguish between productive use of email and horsing around? Or even worse, how do you distinguish between productive use of email, and CC’ing to CYA internal spam where co-workers fill each other’s inboxes with stuff they only ends up wasting time. “Just in case you might need to know about this in six months, let me re-cap today’s meeting”. That stuff can now be put on the blog or into the wiki, and found when it is needed.

Same comment as above,  this issue should already be addressed in an acceptable usage policy for IT.

9. How do I “manage” the gathering and disseminating of so much unstructured information?

This is like the tagging issue. There are tools out there, such as RSS that help.

However, I also believe that it is important, in the enterprise setting, to impose a little structure. Instead of having blogs, for example, have purpose specific blogs:

• People Work Sites can be a combo of resumes, current projects, contact info and personal blog
• Project Work Sites can list the client, include to-do lists, related docs, include updates, and have links to the people working on the project.

The right list of Work Site types (or purpose specific enterprise blogs) depends on the company, and like everything else, will probably evolve over time.

Hmm,  I think special purpose blogs are useful in an enterprise context, however think that an individuals contribution is best represented by an individual blog, individuals who need blogs would tend to be leaders and subject matter experts.  I also think the project blogs, programme blogs, department blogs etc are very useful, but they complement and don’t replace individual blogs.  Take as an example a project manager,  she might maintain a project blog, but her personal blog would have different content, maybe with some overlap.

10. How do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth out of the investment in technology?

What investment? This stuff is so cheap, you will hardly be able to notice the expense.

With customizations, hardware costs, integration costs and deployment costs, you are looking at less that $50,000 for an enterprise blogging system for thousands of users.

I agree, cheap.  I would start off though promoting the idea of blogs to people who will set a good example, subject matter experts, leaders, project managers etc and then let them encourage others by their example.

Andy Jones, a director at Xerox Global Services, explains a crucial change in the way we use paper. “Thirty years ago paper was the definitive record of so many things that happened within business. Today it is increasingly the case that the electronic record is the definitive copy, while paper is becoming much more a work-in-progress medium,” he says.

I agree with the work in progress role of paper, and its this role that multiple monitors and a Tablet PC address.  The Tablet is great for sketching, note taking, review and markup as well as reading on the plane/train.  Multiple monitors avoid the need to use paper as a reference copy while you work on another document on a single PC display.

tags: paperless, tabletpc, multiplemonitors

For action stuff I work through when I get chance and it tends to be software to download, emails to send etc

To watch stuff is self explanatory,  the only twist being that I try and download stuff to watch onto my Tablet so that I can watch it when I am at a loose end, waiting to pick the kids up from swimming for example

To blog stuff, is anything that I find really interesting and want to remember for later,  I find blogging it much more useful than just tagging it because not only do I remember it but I get to think a little about the context and how it links to other things I am interested in.  Of course the spin off benefit is that I get to share it with others in my company and beyond.  I also post stuff on my blog in answer to questions that people ask me, it’s more efficient than email.

I find this usage model for my blog very effective,  in almost every conversation I have now – after writing a blog for 3 years – I tend to illustrate the point I am making with a few links to articles I have already written,  it makes me seem super efficient!

There are many more uses for blogs in the enterprise, some of which I have described on by blog already,  but this post by Martin provides an excellent overview and of course Rod Boothby has consistently excellent posts on the topic.

By the way,  for any of you wondering at the number of posts today – I have just got back from holiday and have an hour to work through my “To Blog” lists before I go swimming!