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First Koral, then ThinkFree and EchoSign
2007-04-10 13:03:00
Three months ago, I wrote about Koral, one of the best online document management systems currently available. Today, Salesforce.com will announce that they acquired the company, and are using its technology to build Apex Content and ContentExchange. This acquisition marks Salesforce.com's entry into the ECM market, but I hope Marc and his team won't stop there. [Continue...]
More About: Free , Think , Sign , First , Oral

Get Your BPMN Schema Today
2007-04-05 04:46:00
In a recent article published by Intelligent Enterprise, my friend Bruce Silver laments that BPDM is essentially useless, and that the BPM industry badly needs an XML schema for BPMN. I could not agree more with him, and I am happy to report that Intalio recently donated such a schema to the Eclipse Foundation, complemented by a ridiculously-good-looking object model for it. Not only did we gave the schema away for free, but we also donated a complete implementation for it. [Continue...]
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SAP Should Get Serious about SaaS
2007-04-04 05:13:00
The market for enterprise applications is not growing much anymore. Faced with this challenge, large enterprise software vendors have only two options: grow through acquisitions, or go after the SMB market, which has been traditionally underserved. This transition is particularly obvious for a couple of vendors -- Oracle and SAP. On the M&A front, nobody could execute better than Larry Ellison and his team today, therefore I contend that SAP's future lies in the SMB market. But SMBs do not like to buy software, mainly because they do not have access to the IT resources that are necessary to deploy and maintain it. Instead, they would rather buy it as a service, as Salesforce.com's demonstrated so well. This is why SAP should really get serious about the Software as a Service model. [Continue...]
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Creating an Office 2.0 Office Space
2007-03-30 19:15:00
Earlier this week, one of the developers at Intalio suggested that the Server Team, which is made of three developers living in San Francisco, CA and working in our Redwood City office, and one developer working from home in Ann Arbor, MI, moves to San Francisco, CA, in order to reduce commute time. Our current offices were already too large for us, and this relocation project might be the compelling event I had been waiting for to move into a more suitable space. This might in turn let us experiment with the creation of an Office 2.0 office space. [Continue...]
More About: Space , Creating , Office Space , Pace

Waiting for the HTC Advantage
2007-03-29 18:38:00
In my quest for the best Office 2.0 mobile device, I recently came across the upcoming HTC Advanta ge. It's a funny little device that is slightly larger than a smartphone or a PDA, but smaller and lighter than the Sony VAIO UX180P or the OQO Model 01+ we reviewed in past articles. [Continue...]
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MindMeister is Über Cool
2007-03-29 07:12:00
One of the must-have applications I had to leave behind when moving to a pure online setup was the excellent Mind Manager from Mindjet. Before going online, I used it for about a year, and it totally redefined the way I managed ideas and implemented the upstream parts of David Allen's GTD process. Unfortunately, no online alternatives existed, until now... [Continue...]
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Clearspace Could Bring Office 2.0 to BPM 2.0
2007-03-28 02:51:00
As indicated last week, the Under The Radar event brought its fair share of discoveries, and I am still trying to find some time to play with some of the applications I saw there. One got me seriously thinking beyond the realm of Office 2.0 though -- Clear space, which is developed by Jive Software. [Continue...]
More About: Space , Ring , Pace

Spreadsheet Roundup
2007-03-27 02:19:00
Here is the eleventh edition of our Weekly Office 2.0 Round up . Today, we will review 10 online spreadsheet editors, from ajaxXLS to Zoho Sheet . We will identify some unique features that might help your own selection process, and you will get a chance to cast your vote for the best online spreadsheet editor. [Continue...]
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Notes From Under the Radar
2007-03-24 06:12:00
Today, I attended the Under The Radar event on Office 2.0 as a judge on a couple of panels (Collaborative Planning and Web Sharing). With over 350 participants, this was one of UTR's most attended events, proof that the Office 2.0 movement is gaining some serious traction. Here are some notes from the field. [Continue...]
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Office 2.0 Startups Should Join the AppExchange
2007-03-22 17:04:00
For a consumer-oriented Web 2.0 startup, eyeballs might be all it takes to get funded. But for an Office 2.0 upstart, paying customers are required to get investors even remotely interested in your venture. This creates an interesting challenge for entrepreneurs: where to find prospects willing to try new products, without having to spend any money on marketing? Part of the answer might be provided by our friends at Salesforce.com, in the form of the AppExchange . [Continue...]
More About: Change , Join , Start

Devices and Tools for the Office 2.0 Conference
2007-03-22 04:28:00
The dates for the second edition of the Office 2.0 Conference have been confirmed: September 5-6, 2007. In the meantime, we are looking for input regarding a couple of topics: the Internet connected device we should get for each participant, and the conference management system we should use for registrations. [Continue...]
More About: Tools , The Office , Devices , Tool

AppSpace Looks Great but Too Expensive
2007-03-21 02:03:00
Yesterday, Salesforce.com launched its Spring '07 edition, and announced AppSpace , a platform allowing the development of customer-facing web based applications powered by the Salesforce.com application and the Apex language. AppSpace is currently scheduled to be available in April as a limited release, and looks very promising. Unfortunately, its current pricing will put it out of range for a broad category of existing or potential Salesforce.com customers. [Continue...]
More About: Great , Pens , Pace , Look

Presentation Roundup
2007-03-20 02:53:00
Here is the tenth edition of our Weekly Office 2.0 Round up . Today, we will review 13 online presentation tools, from AJAX-S to Zoho Show. We will identify some unique features that might help your own selection process, and you will get a chance to cast your vote for the best online presentation tool. [Continue...]
More About: Present , Presentation , Resent

How To Outsource Product Management
2007-03-16 18:16:00
Product Management is one of the most critical functions for any enterprise software companies. As a product gets used by more and more customers, requests for new requirements start to pile in, and the job of a Product Manager is to prioritize them in order to meet customers' needs, while avoiding feature creep. During Intalio's early years as a company, we found it very difficult to manage this process. Too many resources where allocated to the development of features that very few customers actually needed, while features that could have made a significant difference on the market did not get developed, for lack of available resources. We only managed to solve this problem when we decided to outsource it, and selected an unlikely outsourcing partner for it: our customers. [Continue...]
More About: How To , Men , Product , Source

Cisco Goes Office 2.0
2007-03-16 06:12:00
Cisco's acquisition of WebEx brings good and bad news. Good news: the Office 2.0 industry welcomes a formidable new player that has the potential of fundamentally altering the rules of the game. Bad news: WebEx Connect, arguably one of the most ambitious projects announced last year, might be at risk of being neglected. It's too early to tell what the true impact of such an acquisition will be on the industry at large, but here is why it matters. [Continue...]
More About: Cisco , Goes

Sharing the BPEL Love
2007-03-15 00:18:00
Assuming that everything goes as planned, the WS-BPEL 2.0 specification will be approved by OASIS later this month. This will mark the end of a four year long process for taking the BPEL specification to a level where it can be used in production for managing virtually any kind of business process. Intalio is a co-author of the specification, and has been supporting early drafts since February 2006, giving us some invaluable experience regarding its use within the most demanding production environments (Cf. performance numbers). But because the development of this specification was a collaborative effort, it's time to share the love, and I could not think of a better recipient for it than one of our competitors?Oracle. [Continue...]
More About: Love , Ring , Sharing , Shari , Hari

Office 2.0 Bookmarks
2007-03-13 19:33:00
Last week, Vincenzo Belpiede suggested that we make it easier to import bookmarks for all the applications that are registered into the Office 2.0 Database. We liked the idea, and wrote 39 lines of fairly simple PHP code to get it done. If you want access to 459 applications right from your web browser, all you really have to do is import this file into your bookmark manager. [Continue...]
More About: Bookmark , Book , Mark , Marks

Feed Reader Roundup
2007-03-13 03:38:00
Here is the ninth edition of our Weekly Office 2.0 Round up . Today, we will review 11 online feed readers, from Bloglines to Wizz RSS. We will identify some unique features that might help your own selection process, and you will get a chance to cast your vote for the best online feed reader. With the help of many contributors, we completed the Feed Read er section of the Office 2.0 Database. From the 11 players we identified for this article, all but two (Feedeye and Newshutch) are actively developed by legitimate companies. We also focused on dedicated feed readers, therefore did not include applications such as Netvibes that provide feed reading capabilities among many other features. Functionality From a functionality standpoint, an online feed reader lets you subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds, and read their content online. Most applications support the importing and exporting of feed collections using the popular OPML format. Half of the applications we reviewed support the shari...

Office 2.0 Database Redux
2007-03-09 22:43:00
The Office 2.0 Data base created almost a year ago now contains over 450 applications, which have been submitted by more than 150 contributors. It started as a single page separate from the core IT|Redu x blog, then evolved into a collection of pages, but did not offer the ability for readers to write reviews. This is now fixed, with the release of a brand new Office 2.0 Database , with its own domain name. The new database is now available at o20db.com, and is powered by Dabble DB, WordPress, and several other tools listed on this page. Each application has its own page, like this one for Salesforce.com. When data is available, each page displays generic information about the application and its logo, user-generated star rating powered by WP-PostRatings, recent news fetched from the application’s blog using Magpie RSS, Alexa chart courtesy of alexaholic, and Technorati chart. Down the road, we will add thumbnail screenshots (technical solution to be defined), vendor profiles, an...
More About: Taba

Office 2.0 Audit Service
2007-03-08 23:19:02
Following last week’s article on Nielsen/NetRatings and their outrageous claims regarding Google’s marketshare in the Office 2.0 space, I have had discussions with several service providers, and we came up with the conclusion that a better auditing service is needed. Here is what we have in mind. The problem with Nielsen/NetRatings, and many other market research firms, is that they work with panels, and panels tend to exhibit skewed results, especially when they are small and deal with a multitude of channels. If you have a relatively large panel of users, and the number of TV channels they can watch is in the tens or hundreds, you could get fairly decent results. But if you have a relatively small panel of users, and the number of websites they have access to is in the tens or hundreds of millions, your results will be poor at best. This is a difficult problem to solve, and there is no perfect solution for it. Competitors like Alexa managed to establish larger panels, ...
More About: Audi , Service , Audit , Vice

BPEL Works
2007-03-08 23:19:02
You know that a standard works when you can go from one implementation to another, without too much effort. BPEL has been promising such interoperability for quite some time, but to the extent of my knowledge, it has never been demonstrated at a large scale in a production environment. Until now. Over the weekend, Coghead went from one BPEL engine to another, and it worked without a glitch. Today, we can safely say that as an industry standard, BPEL really works. Coghead has developed one of the most innovative Web 2.0 development tools, architected on top of a SQL database and a BPEL engine. For the later, they originally started with the product of one of our competitors, then decided to migrate to Intalio|Server for performance reasons. One of the performance issues they were facing was that they had to manage very many different process models?up to 100,000 on a single server. And with so many models to manage, re-starting the server was taking longer and longer?up to 6 hours fo...
More About: Work , Works

BPM 2.0 Epiphany
2007-03-08 23:19:02
Earlier today, I participated in a lively ebizQ panel organized by Sandy Kemsley, with Phil Larson, Director of Product Strategy for Appian Corporation, and Phil Gilbert, Executive Vice President and CTO for Lombardi Software. We discussed about BPM and Enterprise 2.0, and had lots of fun arguing whether it was important for a process modeling tool to be web-based or not. But what I will remember from this call is the epiphany I got about BPM 2.0, and what makes Intalio’s vision for BPM so different from the one of our competitors, Lombardi first among them. If you read Phil Gilbert’s report on the panel, you quickly realize that his approach to BPM is not very far from the Business Process Reengineering (BPR) school of thought that was so popular in the early 90’s. It’s radically top-down, exclusively driven by abstract process models, and inescapably tied to a traditional software engineering process, whereby a lot of code has to be written to make the who...
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Email Roundup
2007-03-08 11:18:01
Here is the eighth edition of our Weekly Office 2.0 Round up . Today, we will review 10 online email applications, from FastMail to Zimbra. We will identify some unique features that might help your own selection process?if you’re not already set, and you will get a chance to cast your vote for the best online email application. With the help of many contributors, we completed the Email section of the Office 2.0 Database. From the 10 players we identified, all but one (Tamadaa) are actively developed by legitimate companies. Because there are so many online email applications currently available on the market, we focused on the ones that have been registered into the Office 2.0 Database by our contributors. Please feel free to point us to others that we might have overlooked. Functionality From a functionality standpoint, an online email application lets you read and write emails from any web browser. The simplest ones are tied to a specific email account, sometimes itself tied ...

Nielsen/NetRatings Got It Wrong
2007-03-03 11:15:01
Last week, market research firm Nielsen /NetRatings issued a press release claiming that Google Docs and Spreadsheets dominate web-based productivity tools since October, with a market share of 92 percent of unique visitors. I must say that I love Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and I am sure that it’s a very popular service, but somehow, I am having a hard time believing that EditGrid, Num Sum, ThinkFree, WriteBoard, and Zoho?all of them included in Nielsen/NetRatings’ research?would together only account to a meager 8 percent. So I decided to do my own research, and came up with some interesting conclusions. To conduct my investigation, I focused on the two players that I am most familiar with: ThinkFree and Zoho. I asked them how many unique visitors they got in October, 2006, and here are the answers I got: ThinkFree got just under 100,000, and Zoho 123,649. So let’s call it 220,000 together, and let’s assume for a minute that EditGrid, Numsum.com, and Write...
More About: Trat , Wrong , Else

The Temptation of Reinvention
2007-03-03 11:15:01
Today, there is not one week that passes by during which I do not hear the CEO, CTO, or Vice President of Engineering of a software company or online service provider complaining about the fact that some years ago, his or her company embarked on the development of a proprietary workflow engine, and today, its maintenance has become a pure nightmare. When no meaningful standard for workflow was available, and off-the-shelf products were quite specific and very expensive, such a custom development might have found some elements of justification. But today, with the adoption of well-established standards for BPM, and the availability of commercially-supported open-source platforms, there is absolutely no reason why you should reinvent the process wheel. Standards have been set If you still had any doubts, Microsoft’s recent decision to finally adopt BPEL 2.0 for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) should help you move on. BPEL won the battle of standards, and any BPM product that is...
More About: Invention , Vent , Temptation , Temp

Feed Update
2007-03-03 11:15:01
When we upgraded IT|Redux to its new design, we made some changes to its RSS feed as well, and more changes might be made down the road. So, in order to avoid any service interruption, I strongly encourage you to check that your feed reader is using the correct feed URL. This URL is provided by the excellent Feed Burner, and will never change: http://feeds.feedburner.com/itredux Thank you for your support!
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Document Manager Roundup
2007-03-02 11:14:01
Here is the seventh edition of our Weekly Office 2.0 Roundup . Today, we will review 7 online document management applications, from Blinksale to ShareMethods. We will identify some unique features that might help your own selection process?if you’re not already set, and you will get a chance to cast your vote for the best online document management application. With the help of many contributors, we completed the Document Mana ger section of the Office 2.0 Database. From the 7 players we identified, all are actively developed by legitimate companies. Three can be characterized as general-purpose document management applications (docHarbor, Koral, and ShareMethods), while four tend to focus on specific document-centric workflow processes, such as document signing or invoice presentment (Blinksale, DocuSign, EchoSign, and FreshBooks). Six out of seven solutions are predominantly targeted at the small and midsize business (SMB) market, while one (docHarbor) is targeted at the larg...
More About: Men

Preparing for Office 2.0 2007
2007-03-02 11:14:01
February will be gone by tomorrow, and it’s time for us to start preparing for the second edition of the Office 2.0 Conference. Last time, we had less than six weeks to get everything ready. This time around, I would love to get a little bit more than six months, just to make sure that we do not repeat the same mistakes. At present time, we are tentatively set for September 5-6 in San Francisco, CA. If these dates do not work for you, for any reason, please let me know. In the meantime, here are some more details on what you should expect for this upcoming event. First, we will preserve the overall format. Two days were about right for an event of this kind, even if it felt a little bit rushed to some. You want it that way though?boredom is a momentum killer. The St. Regis was very nice, but we are also considering the Four Seasons. Options make for better negotiations… Second, we will work to improve the overall quality of the content. We will be more selective on the s...
More About: Ring , Prep

Who Needs BPM as a Service
2007-02-27 11:12:01
Two weeks ago, a couple of independent BPM vendors announced plans for the release of BPM platforms to be offered as a service. This got the BPM digerati all excited, and for a day or two, the most enthusiastic commentators were raving about the prospect of getting BPM on tap, directly from their web browsers. Then, some cared to read the small prints, and quickly realized that they would have to wait a little bit more for their newfound dreams to come true. Indeed, and upon closer inspection, what had been announced back then was nothing more than a wizard-driven diagramming tool for ultra-primitive models on one hand, and the hosting of a complex software stack without native support for multi-tenancy on the other. Hardly the stuff of ground-breaking news, but there is nothing like a good marketing spin to spice things up a bit. The first is heralded as a process discovery tool that would allow business analysts to model high-level processes, then generate a skeleton that technica...
More About: Service , Need , Vice , Needs

Here Comes the Fun
2007-02-23 23:09:02
As anticipated, Google finally released a commercial version of Google Apps. For $50 per user and per year, you get 10 GB of storage per account (instead of the 2.82 GB currently offered with free accounts), shared calendar resources, APIs, support, and a couple other things, which are described in details on this page. So let’s take a look at what this release really means for the Office 2.0 movement in general, and Office 2.0 workers in particular. First and foremost, it means that Google is dead serious about Office 2.0. Among the plethora of services currently offered by the company, very few have commercial versions today, and most never will. Asking people to pay for a service is a lot harder than giving it away for free, for it requires a complete billing infrastructure, alongside human beings ready to pick up the phone when paying customers need some help. More than any other company in the space, Google has been very modest in rolling out new commercial offerings, and...
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