Free Access To ‘Streams In Business Report’ This Week Only

To celebrate the launch of Podio tonight (at the Podio Store, 224 6th in San Francisco) I am going to provide free access to my report, Streams In Business, this week only. The report provides in-depth scenario-based evaluations of the following products: Podio, Bantam Live, Cohuman, Flowr, IBM Connections, Mangoapps, Socialcast, and Yammer.

Here’s one comment about Podio, from the report:

The combination of rich user-defined or user-customizable applications and Podio’s mechanisms for easily filtering the datasets being managed by their apps seems to be to be an amazingly powerful environment for managing everyday workflows, and sharing the stream of activities that form the basis of today’s work.

If you’d like to read just the Podio chapter, it is accessible here. It may be helpful to read the scenarios description that I use to evaluate the products in the report, here.

The full report is managed in a Box.net folder, located at http://www.box.net/shared/ko7v7z6gvr and the password to open it is ‘antimony’. Box.net supports download an entire folder, or you can download the files independently.

Please leave comment or questions on this blog post, if you’d like.

Adapting To A New Tempo: ‘Streams In Business’ Research Report Versioning

I have been deep in the investigation of streaming applications designed to be used in business for several months. Think of it as Twitter or Facebook for the enterprise (a list of the companies involved follows), also know as microblogging for the enterprise.

For months I’ve been heads down, evaluating products, getting demos, writing my observations, and basically heading toward publishing a report on the state of the market. The date of publication has slipped a bit, for two very different reasons. First, I have been dealing with a bit of a family crisis, as my very ill father has had to enter an assisted living facility, and is now receiving hospice care. But more pertinent to the study itself, the pace of the technical world has made the research and the report very difficult.

These difficulties also included the obvious fact that the staff of the various product companies are extremely busy. This has led to rescheduling of demos, slipped deadlines on demo materials, and in some cases companies opting out of the study simply because they have no time. (Note: some of the companies in the study are sponsoring my research, but some are not, so money is not a requirement, although it comes with extra benefits, including a chance to review their respective chapter of the report, and a briefing after the report is completed.)

Another factor making the research difficult is that new streaming application companies are popping up all the time. In just the past two months I came across Podio, Cohuman, and Flowr, and all have become involved in the study.

And a third factor is that the products keep changing. While I was writing up the section about Flowr, this week, I logged into my Flowr account to check a detail. I saw that some major user interface changes had taken place, and I sent an email to my contact there asking for updated screenshots for the chapter. I am still awaiting them, but I will likely get them in the next few days. However, by that time, something equally significant may have happened on Yammer, or BantamLive. I might have to turn around and ask those companies for updates. And so on.

It is these last two factors that are the most challenging, as an increasing tempo and rate of innovation in this hot corner of the social business marketplace makes pinning down the players in a short window of time very difficult.

I had a insight the other morning, in that semi-asleep moment just before fully waking up. I saw the report as a version, just like the products that I am reviewing.

So rather than trying to be completely comprehensive, and issuing the report once per year, I am going over to a more agile model.

The report will be versioned, and the first version — coming out the week after next — will be version 2010.1. I have decided to make the calendar year the prefix of the versioning scheme, for simplicity’s sake. I plan to release new versions every six to eight weeks (2010.2, 2011.1, etc.), adding new product reviews and updating others, as major updates in the streaming apps are announced or released.

Here’s the outline of the report, version 2010.1:

The Streams In Business Research Report 2010.1

preface

Introduction — A summary of the subject, the approach taken, and the scenarios used to evaluate the products (see Microstreams In Business: Scenarios For Product Evaluation).

Product Evaluations: Positioning, Scenario-based Evaluation, and Conclusions for the following products

  • BantamLive
  • Coffee Bean Technology
  • Cohuman
  • Flowr
  • IBM Connections
  • MangoApps
  • Newsgator
  • Podio
  • Socialcast
  • Yammer
Conclusions
  • Dimensions of Differentiation
  • Communication 
  • Coordination
  • Context
  • Community
  • Complement
  • What’s Ahead

In upcoming versions, I hope to include other competitors such as Salesforce Chatter, Socialtext, Traction Software, Huddle, BlueKiwi, Brainpark, Jive Software, and others too many to mention. That is a function of their ability to work with me on the evaluation, though.

What Does This Mean To A Report Buyer?

Obviously, this rapid change in the market has repercussions for buyers of the report (and buyers of the products, as well). For example, Betty Ling might buy a copy of the report on 5 November, and by 15 December new product releases may come along to change her thinking about which product might be the best for her company.

Since we can’t put a brake on the market, We can offer the buyer the opportunity to stay up with it. So, I am going to modify my pricing model to allow a buyer three versions of the report. So Betty could download the 2010.2 version of the report in December, and also a copy of the 2011.4 report in June 2011, just to see what’s out there.

A buyer will received the current version at the time of purchase, and then can request up to two more copies via email, and those versions will be sent along. Additional versions will be available for an additional fee.

The report subscription — up to three copies within 12 calendar months from initial purchase — is $195, and this include access to all free and for fee webinars that I hold on the topic.

For information on the report and the webinars, sign up for the mailing list, here. We will be mailing out updates in the next week about the report and webinars.

Apple In The Enterprise

Jonny Evans went to EuroFinance, and hobnobbed with the bankers and financial services types, and what did he see? iPads and iPhones.

Jonny Evans, Apple’s growing place in the enterprise

Every other bank seems to compelled to produce non-consumer iPhone apps for their corporate clients. This trend’s reflected in new training provision now being made for enterprise users turning to iOS.

Bloomberg is producing an iPad app for subscribers to its world-class financial information service. This will be an extension of existing multiple-platform support, but already it looks as if the kind of intuitive access to deep financial market information this app will provide gives financial folk yet another reason to spring a few hundred dollars on the Apple device.

BNP Paribas this week announced that its NeoLink client portal is now available on iPad.

On launch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs attracted a lot of attention when he called the iPad ‘magical’….turns out he may have been right.

Think about it. Just over six months since iPad reached the shops it has already built for itself the visibility it takes to attract interest from those at the heart of corporate finance. It has motivated banks, financial houses and world-class firms such as Bloomberg to produce apps for the platform.

Why?

Portability and power is part of it. Screen real estate is another. The always on connectedness of the device lends an extra string to the bow, but the main drive here is the app store.

[…]

At root of all this is the relative affordability of development of apps — and not just for Apple, either, it extends beyond this to the wider world, Android, and other smartphone platforms in future….

The relative affordability of app development make it possible for larger and small firms to develop software that answers their specific needs at a cost they can sustain. This is a massively multiplayer world of niche app developments, the phrase ‘there’s an app for that’ is moving away from being trite and pervasive to becoming true.

[…]

I hear one major international banking chain is already developing not one not two but literally hundreds of different iApps. .

This level of wide support for an Apple product would never have happened in the past. In the corporate/enterprise sector, at least, Apple has arrived.

My recent experience — with companies building stream applications for enterprise collaboration and coordination — is a small sample, but iPhone and iPad are just about the only mobile clients being developed. So it looks like the business world — and expecially the world of banking and finance — is moving to the iPad very very quickly indeed.

related articles

Microstreams In Business: Status Update And Pointers

The Microstreams In Business research project has been going along very well, especially since I was able to meet with a lot of vendors at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. We have a number of the vendors participating in the project, including

  • IBM
  • Socialcast
  • Newsgator
  • Yammer
  • Socialwok
  • Coffee Bean Technology
  • Threadbox
  • BantamLive
  • BlueKiwi
  • Socialtext
  • and we are in discussions with many others, including Workstreamer, Cisco, and Salesforce.

The study is a combination of direct research on vendors products (by scenario development) and a survey. I intend to expand on the straw poll I conducted at the outset of the research (see Initial Straw Poll On Microstreams In Business) with a more detailed survey that I plan to release later this week or next.

In July I plan to walk through the companies’ mocked-up responses to the scenarios I devised (see Microstreams In Business: Scenarios For Product Evaluation), and then to spend August writing up the results.

The report will be structured with in three sections:

Introduction — An overview of the project, definitions, and an overview of the marketplace for social tools in the enterprise, with particulalr attention to microstreams.

For each participant, a chapter will examine the company’s offering, covering the following:

Positioning — In essence, this is a quick look at how the vendor positions its product. Is it integrated with other products of the company or partners, or is it a dedicated standalone offering? Is it targeted for specific industries or functions? Of course, all of this is taken with a grain of salt, since it is relatively unproven: it’s just an assertion by the vendor.

Scenario-Based Evaluation — The second part of the analysis is based on several high-level scenarios that I am developing (see below), which are intended to cover a reasonable range of use cases that will demonstrate the breadth and depth of the offerings. The vendors will have a reasonable time — several weeks at least — to mock-up example implementations of the scenarios. I hope to have the opportunity to walk through these with representatives of the vendors companies, either face-to-face or remotely, and gathering screenshots for the final report. Vendors can make the scenarios as simple or as complex as they’d like, for example if a vendor wants to demonstrate special functionality, or integration with other tools.

Cross Product Analysis and Segmentation — The third part of the analysis forms the second half of the research activity, which is a cross product analysis of the capabiiities of the various products evaluated, and their segmentation into different niches. I anticipate that some products will naturally gravitate toward sales and marketing outreach, while others will be better suited for internal project coordination. My goal in this is not to develop a single list of products ordered from best to worst based on some hypothetical customer. On the contrary, my belief is that there are a wide variety of user profiles, and any given product may fit one or more well, but no product is likely to match the needs of all customers. Over the next few weeks I will also be developing a more detailed survey to try to establish more clearly what features and functionality potential customers desire, and how they cluster.

In September I will be holding a series of webinars to explore the results, as well as selling the report. There will be a fee to attend the webinars, and the report will be retailing for $195. Subscribers to the Microstreams In Business research will receive

  • a copy of the final report, planned for September 2010 release;
  • two seats at MIB webinars: currently planning on three or four in September;
  • a two-hour web briefing discussing the findings and their application to the specific company’s needs.

The full research sponsorship will be $500 in September; for those signing up in July the cost is only $450. Those interested can contact me at stoweboyd AT gmail DOT com.

Microstreams In Business: Scenarios For Product Evaluation

As part of the Microstreams In Business project, I want to evaluate the leading 12 or 15 products that provide either a dedicated or integrated microstreaming (microblogging) solution for business use.

You can imagine a wide variety of approaches to doing this sort of analysis. In my case, however, I have rapidly down-selected to a three part approach to evaluating each of the tools:

  • Positioning — In essence, this is a quick look at how the vendor positions its product. Is it integrated with other products of the company or partners, or is it a dedicated standalone offering? Is it targeted for specific industries or functions? Of course, all of this is taken with a grain of salt, since it is relatively unproven: it’s just an assertion by the vendor.
  • Scenario-Based Evaluation — The second part of the analysis is based on several high-level scenarios that I am developing (see below), which are intended to cover a reasonable range of use cases that will demonstrate the breadth and depth of the offerings. The vendors will have a reasonable time — several weeks at least — to mock-up example implementations of the scenarios. I hope to have the opportunity to walk through these with representatives of the vendors companies, either face-to-face or remotely, and gathering screen shots for the final report. Vendors can make the scenarios as simple or as complex as they’d like, for example if a vendor wants to demonstrate special functionality, or integration with other tools.
  • Cross Product Analysis and Segmentation — The third part of the analysis forms the second half of the research activity, which is a cross product analysis of the capabilities of the various products evaluated, and their segmentation into different niches. I anticipate that some products will naturally gravitate toward sales and marketing outreach, while others will be better suited for internal project coordination. My goal in this is not to develop a single list of products ordered from best to worst based on some hypothetical customer. On the contrary, my belief is that there are a wide variety of user profiles, and any given product may fit one or more well, but no product is likely to match the needs of all customers. Over the next few weeks I will also be developing a more detailed survey to try to establsih more clearly what features and functionality potential customers desire, and how they cluster.

High-Level Scenarios Of Use

There is a limit to the level of effort that we can expect the participating vendors to invest in this research, but I have devised a few scenarios with the hope that they will provide enough sunlight to grasp the capabilities of a very large and diverse group of participating vendor companies.

The scenarios are all centered on a fictitious international consulting company called AdjectiveNoun. I have sketched out three scenarios, and some capabilities that I am hoping to see in each.

Cross-Company Scenario

AdjectiveNoun is involved in a consulting project for a client, Conglomerated Donuts, and needs to coordinate the project with internal and external developers, as well as the client’s various groups, such as marketing and engineering. As a project-within-the-project, the developers — both AdjectiveNoun staff and consultants — are building and managing software for CG.

¿ How are tasks, events, and deadlines supported in the tool ?

¿ How is a project represented ? Can there be sub projects ?

¿ What sort of visibility controls are provided ? What is the granularity of access?

¿ How are ‘external’ members of the project invited in ?

¿ What can be passed through the microstreams to project members ? Files ? Events ? Tasks ?

¿ How are ‘help desk’ and code development activities supported, if at all ? Native support, or integration with external tools, or just general coordination ?

¿ Is there some sort of ‘federation of identity’ supported ? How are AdjectiveNoun and Conglomerated Donuts implemented in the platform ?

Business Development Scenario

AdjectiveNoun has an ongoing marketing and sales program, involving community outreach, networking, and webinars, involving a national marketing team and a regional sales force. The community outreach involves crowdsourcing activities — getting current customers and partners to help with AdjectiveNoun’s goals to improve their services and brainstorm new services as well.

¿ What support does the tool provided for step-by-step, status-based workflows like marketing campaigns and sales  ?

¿ Is there any integration with email, such as invitations to non-users and activities like webinars ?

¿ What support is there for outreach marketing, like surveys or users forums ?

¿ How can crowdsourcing be supported, like a program with existing customers to help improve AdjectiveNoun’s outsourced help desk line of business ?

¿ How can results be rolled up, like predictions about quarterly sales results ? Are there tables, charts, or other displays ?

¿ Can external information streams — like RSS feeds and alerts — be integrated into the microstream, and associated with business activities like sales calls or client follow-up  ?

¿ Are sales tools like presentations and white papers accessible in the stream ?

Human Resource Scenario

AdjectiveNoun’s HR department has very aggressive staffing and training goals, and coordinates this with managers and project leads across the US and European operations. The company is committed to working to make sure that staff are presented with a variety of opportunities for growth, including international assignments, management training, and specific technical training courses. The company has developed an extensive suite of online video and text training resources.

¿ What capabilities are their to support recruiting ? Can specific email addresses be connected with an HR thread, so that candidates can send in resumes to an HR stream ?

¿ How would posting of job and training opportunities be handled ?

¿ Do users have extensive profiles, including options for a portfolio of skills, including company certifications ?

¿ How would the end-to-end handling of a candidate for a specific job run ? Likewise, the formation of a new marketing group in Europe, and posting the various jobs for that ?

Next Steps

These scenarios are provisional at the moment, although I have discussed them with four or five companies to date. I would expect to gather additional feedback in the next few weeks, and to solidify the scenarios after the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in early June. Companies would then have as long as a month to develop mock-ups indicating how such scenarios might be supported. (I expect that this will involve dummy accounts, and scenario-driven play-acting of the sort most vendors undertake for their marketing efforts anyway. In fact, existing sandbox examples could be used and modified to suit.)

My goal is to have a face-to-face or remote meeting with all the vendors by the end of July at the latest, so that in late July and August I can complete the analysis and write the report. This would lead to a late August or early September availability of the final report.

Initial Straw Poll On Microstreams In Business

I have been testing out various email tools to get folks involved in the research we’re doing this summer, and one of the tools has a survey capability. So I asked a handful of questions to a group of about 150 contacts, and getting about 35 responses. I intend a more rigorous survey in the coming weeks — with a larger base of contacts once I have settled on the tools to do that — but in the meantime, here’s some stats.

1. Is your organization using microstreaming tools as a part of everyday business?

89% say yes, and 6% plan to. Obviously heading toward ubiquity (cum grano salis, since this is an early adopter group).

 

2. If you are using or have used microstream tools in your organization, were they general purpose tools (like Twitter and Facebook) or tools designed for business (like Yammer, Socialtext, etc.)?

Only a quarter are using tools designed specifically for business; I wager that will change as the business tools mature.

 

3. What microstreaming tools have you personally used?

Mostly its the general, ‘consumer’ tools; Yammer seems to have the jump on the others in the survey, although I omitted IBM Connections (d’uh).

4. What features do you want to have supported in a microstreaming solution for business?

Every feature was desired by at least half of the respondents, so a better survey technique would have them order or weigh their choices, I think. It does demonstrate a hunger for more sophisticated streaming applications for business, since no product has all of these at this point.


 5. How large is your organization?

Skews toward smaller companies, so results with large companies would like vary significantly.


 6. Where is your company headquartered?

Cross tabulating the earlier answers by country and company size would be nice, but I don’t think I can with this survey tool. I need a more sophisticated tool, or raw data that I can dump into excel and cross tab.


Findings And Next Steps

I was surprised by the numbers of people trying to use these tools in everyday business; again, I think that is a function of the set of people and the size of the companies. The most important observation to take away might be the desire for a broad range of functionality — CRM, file sharing, calendar integration, and so on — which is way in advance of today’s tools.

I am likely to undertake subsequent surveys using Squarespace forms, since then I can get access to the individual entries, which will allow complete cross tabulations.

Microstreams In Business: Research Study And Report

Over the next few months, I will be developing a report on the use of microstreams in the business context, called Social Architecture: Microstreams In Business. I plan to analyze the promise and actual benefits of streaming applications in the business context.

The report will provide in-depth review and analysis of general purpose technologies such as Twitter and Facebook in the business setting, but will dig deep into offerings intended specifically for the business, such as Yammer, Salesforce.com Chatter, Threadbox, SocialText Signals, Workstreamer, Socialcast, Socialwok, Present.ly, Shareflow, BantamLive, and others.

Our goal is to determine key factors that these applications are focused on, and what the important differences are between them, to help business users make the best choice when considering a microstreaming (or microblogging) tool.

Subscribers to the Microstreams In Business research will receive

  • a copy of the final report, planned for late August 2010 release;
  • a two-hour web briefing discussing the findings and their application to the specific company’s needs.

The full research sponsorship is $500.

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