LepoLand - A Blog by Alan Lepofsky

I know I'm late to the game, but I finally upgraded from Mac OSX 10.5.8 to 10.6.2 last night.

One of the new features I was the most excited about was "Sort your Spotlight search results by name, date modified, date created, size, kind, or label."  Sadly, it does not work as I (nor many other upset people posting to various forums) expected.  As you can see below, the only sort options in list view are name, date, and kind.  Size is greyed out.  Size is an extremely useful search parameter, which I want to use to find things like "that big presentation I created for conference x" or "the high def version of the product video I recorded."



Sort by size is available in the icon view, but that is not the view I want to use.  I found a hack in See more fields in Finder Spotlight search results, but I've not tried it yet.  I figured I should use Snow Leopard for at least one day before messing around with preference files.

To balance my complaint with something positive, I like the new Text substitution features.  "Text substitution lets you create shortcuts for phrases you use frequently that will expand automatically as you type. Common substitutions are built in — for example, changing (c) to a copyright symbol (©) and fractions from 1/2 to ½. You can also add your own substitutions; for example, “pnc” can expand to “privileged and confidential,” and your initials can expand to your full name."  I've already created substitutions such as myhomeaddress and myworkaddress, but they don't appear to work in all applications.  

I also like how Expose now shows applications that are minimized.

Overall, I still think the Mac UI and applications could use a lot of improvement.  It is silly to only allow window resizing from the bottom right corner.  Some of the default keyboard shortcuts are ridiculous.  Finder and Spotlight are mediocre.  Address Book and Calendar need modernization.  Please don't respond with "Well than why do you use it, you could use Windows."  I like my Mac and enjoy it, I'm just not in the "Apple is perfect camp" that so many fan-boys blindly adhere to.

In Star Trek, the crew of the Enterprise could get an answer to almost any question instantly, simply by asking the Computer out loud. While we're not quite there yet, with countless websites, search engines, and social networks providing access to almost unlimited data, we're pretty damn close.

The problem is that while automated search results are helpful, they often provide more information that you can (or want to) process. So how do we filter through all the results to get the best answers? The solution often involves turning to people. We ask our friends and colleagues for their insight and opinions. For example, on Twitter and Facebook, many people ask questions to the network they've built, rather than "Googling" for the answer. If you need to know who sings a certain song, or where you can get a replacement battery for your Macbook, odds are someone in your community will quickly provide a response. The power of querying your friends led both Google and Microsoft to pay Twitter millions to add public tweets in the results of their massive search engines.

As the use of question-and-answers over social technologies increases, businesses are looking at how they can provide similar services internally. That's where a secure enterprise microblogging solution, such as Socialtext Signals, comes in handy. Signals allows colleagues to conduct Twitter-like Q&A, but do so internally, eliminating any concerns that company confidential information might be discussed in public.

With Signals, you can ask questions openly to your colleagues in a private setting, and get informed answers quickly. This represents a huge departure from past technologies. In the past, if you had an HR-related question, you most likely would have sent an email to someone in the HR department, and that's if you even knew the proper person to contact. Depending on the size of your company, you might spend 20 minutes first, just trying to identify who to reach out to. Microblogging works much differently. If you ask the same question openly via Signals, anyone in HR has the opportunity to respond, or you might even get an answer back from someone in Engineering or Sales, who recently had the same question and now knows the answer. Additionally, that conversation is now discoverable by everyone, rather than locked away in just your individual inbox.

Similar to how social networks provide advantages over Googling, Q&A via Signals also has advantages versus standard intranet searches:

• Search indexes don't (yet!) contain the information inside our heads. I can't search the company intranet for "Does anyone have connections with a graphic artist that could help us with our new website?" Being able to access the wealth of tactic knowledge from across the entire organization is incredibly valuable.
• Search results don't factor in the human traits like opinion and experience which your colleagues can provide.  While automated results are quick and plentiful, they may not always provide the most useful information.
• Search is only good when you know what you're looking for. If I want to find "Who is the Sales Exec for the Acme account", an intranet search will probably find that from a page or profile. But an intranet search won't help much with "Does anyone remember the name of the company that launched last week saying their engine is 10% faster than ours?"

As you can see, enterprise microblogging can empower your entire organization to help one another. Questions get answered faster, enabling people to spend more time on business tasks, rather than searching for information.

Last week I wrote Using Social Software To Accelerate Business Performance, as the introductory post to a new series where I'm going to discuss how "Enterprise 2.0" tools provide benefits in the business world.  I'm going to begin the series today by discussing the internal use of microblogging, which enables people to openly share short messages with their coworkers.  

For those of you unfamiliar with microblogging, the most widely known example is Twitter, where you enter "140-character or less" messages, press update, and essentially anyone in the world can read what you have to say.  Notice that microblogging differs greatly from email and instant messaging, where the audience is limited, since you specifically choose who the recipients of an email or chat message are.  With microblogging, the information is shared openly, enabling more people to read, and thus benefit from what is being shared.  

Internal microblogging provides companies similar benefits to services like Twitter, but adds a layer of privacy, by sharing the information only within your company.    This enables you to provide status updates internally, which you would not share with the public.  For example, you can mention customer accounts, codenames, future projects, and other "internal-only" things.  (last sentence added after original post)

Socialtext provides internal microblogging via Socialtext Signals.  With Signals, when someone posts a message, all their colleagues can read what is being shared.  (In a future blog post I'll explain how you can send signals to a subset of people using Groups)  It important to point out that the content shared via signals is searchable, so the information can be discovered by everyone at any time.  Compare that to email, where a great deal of valuable knowledge is locked away in individual in-boxes, available only to the people that were listed on the To: and cc: lists.

So let's look at a specific example.  This morning I signaled a status update "Generating a list of 2000 fake name, titles, phone numbers, and office locations for our new demo sandboxes."  I did not think much of it at the time.  I was simply practicing what I preach, and openly sharing with my coworkers what I was doing.  Much to my delight, an hour or so later (as seen below) one of my colleagues Graham, read what I wrote and replied with "Once you've got that list, could you send me a copy?"



Now Graham does not work with me in Marketing.  He's one of our developers who happens to work on things like directories and LDAP.  The 10 seconds it took me to share what I was doing, has now saved Graham hours of time duplicating the work.  Multiply the time saving benefits of this one occurrence by the dozens of similar times that this happens each day, and then ask yourself "How can we afford not to be using microblogging inside our company?"

Want more proof, take a moment and read about how St. Louis Public Radio is using Signals to openly share information.  As station manager Tim Eby says: “People understand each other more, and they know what others are doing. This lets us respond more quickly to new opportunities."

Next up, I'm going to write about how you can use internal microblogging for questions and answers.

One of the main themes of the "2.0" world is the shift to more open sharing of information.  In our personal lives, that shift is fairly well understood and accepted.  Pictures are shared on Flickr.  Videos are shared on Youtube.  We talk about our lives on our blogs.  We say what we're doing on Twitter.  We even tell people exactly where we are on Foursquare.  Our lives are an open book, for friends, family, and sometimes even strangers to see.

In the business world, many companies are just now starting to understand the benefits that open sharing can provide their staff.  If your management is asking why they should be looking at blogs, wikis, microblogging, activity streams, profiles, etc, then ask them the following?

• Why should someone know more about their friends' interests and skills, than their coworkers'?  
• Why should someone be more up to date with what their friends are doing on the weekend, than what their teammates are working on for an important project?
• Why should it be easier to share information with your mom, than with your manager?

Enterprise social software is focused on helping colleagues share information, ideas, and expertise openly so that everyone in the organization can benefit.   However, this change does not simply occur by flipping a switch.  If you want employees to transition from a world of email and file attachments to a more collaborative way of working, you don't want to overwhelm them with tools.  You want to provide new methods of working, but ones that fit into the flow of their daily tasks.

Over my next few blog posts, I'm going to step you through how I use these tools in my daily flow.  Hopefully you'll see some ways that could benefit you, and your company.   I also hope you'll share with me the ways social software is improving the way you work.

Today we launched Socialtext 4.0, which makes it simple for people to form groups around common goals or areas of interest.  Groups can share information, ideas, and status messages via microblogging with Socialtext Signals, and create wiki pages, spreadsheets, and blog entries in Socialtext Workspaces.

"The focus of our enterprise social software has always been to accelerate business performance for our customers, by giving their people new ways to share knowledge and expertise," says Eugene Lee, Socialtext's CEO

Socialtext 4.0 Overview


David Needle on Internet.com - Socialtext 4.0 Filters Twitter-Like Signals
"Socialtext are aligning these technologies more closely than ever before with activities that enterprises do and work that needs to get done.  Socialtext is doing what it needs to do to stand out in a competitive social networking services market.  This is also a 'hardened' application with security features that enterprises are going to appreciate" - Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz

Dennis Howlett on ZDNet - Socialtext 4 focuses on richer microblogging
"Socialtext is plowing the right course by homing in on solving some of the practical problems in hefting the technology into valuable use."

Alex Williams on ReadWriteWeb - Socialtext, Groups and the Context of the Social Web
"Socialtext is one of the smarter companies we cover in the enterprise space.  Most noteworthy is its new group capabilities. It's like a threaded, real-time stream. It just makes sense. A real-time stream is useless if it is one river of news. You need to channel the real-time flow so you can see its context."

TechCrunch - Socialtext 4.0 Launches With Groups, Better Search, And Activity Stream Filtering
"Socialtext’s offering is compelling for many businesses because of its on-premise offerings that provides security options unavailable in its cloud-based competitors."

VentureBeat - Socialtext 4.0 brings stronger group features to business microblogging and more
"There are several new features, a number of them revolving around helping users find what’s useful in all the activity and chatter of a big organization by focusing on particular groups or conversations."

Stowe Boyd - Socialtext 4.0
"...it is clear to me that Socialtext has brought together a collection of social tools in a very well integrated framework. The new group (or project) functionality allows a much finer grained social scale to be applied in the enterprise, which leads to sensible ways to minimize the torrent of updates in the activity stream."

Clint Boulton on Eweek - Socialtext 4.0 Supports Groups, Microblogging Channels
Juan Carlos Perez  on CIO.com - Socialtext Adds Tools to Manage Its Twitter-Like Stream
Simon Mackie on WebWorkerDaily - Socialtext 4.0 Adds Groups, Channels
Chelsi Nakano on CMS Wire - Socialtext 4.0 Brings Better Collaboration to Enterprise


Socialtext Groups

"To address the difficulty in getting researchers to interact with each other at the semi-annual forum, GM turned to Socialtext to provide a central, secure place where this research can be shared openly among the GM research community -- and where it is searchable and discoverable." - John Suh, a Staff Researcher at the GM Advanced Technology Silicon Valley Office

Full story: How General Motors Uses Socialtext for Its R&D.

As reported on Niklas Heidloff's blog, Hiroyuki Okamoto has created a very cool 3D history browser for Lotus Notes.  It currently only works on Windows, so even though it emulates the carousel feature made popular by Apple, it does not yet work on Macs.



I don't know anything about Eclipse plugin development, but I thought the point to moving to Eclipse was for cross platform support?  What is it about certain plugins that cause them to not work across OSes?
Also, is there anyway for the installer to know you are on unsupported platform, and tell you that? (and prevent the install)