LepoLand - A Blog by Alan Lepofsky

In Star Trek, the crew of the USS Enterprise could get an answer to almost any question, simply by asking out loud.  Each week viewers witnessed inquiries such as "Computer, how long will it take to get to Epsilon Vega at Warp 6?" or "Computer what is the average airspeed of an unladen swallow?"  Back in the real world, we are not quite there yet, but we're pretty damn close.  

Via countless websites, search engines, and social networks we have almost unlimited information at our disposal.  The problem is that automated search results while helpful, often provide more information that you can possibly process.  So how do we filter through all the results to get answers?  The solution often involves turning to the human factor, and asking our friends for their insight and opinions.  As the popularity of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook grow, it's becoming quite common practice to ask questions there, 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, just ask on Twitter.  Both Google and Microsoft paid millions to Twitter to add public tweets to their search results, that's how significant this is.

While asking questions on Twitter or Facebook is extremely helpful, there are limitations.  For example, your boss is not going to be very happy if you're asking company-confidential questions in public.  That's where private enterprise microblogging solutions, such as Socialtext Signals come in.

With Signals, you can ask questions openly to your colleagues, while keeping the information private within your company.  By asking questions openly via microblogging, everyone in your organization has the opportunity to answer.  Say you have an HR related question.  In the past you probably would have sent an email to someone in HR, that is after you spend 20 minutes figuring out who that is, and then waited for their reply.  Compare that to asking openly in Signals, where now you may get an answer back from someone in Engineering or Sales, who recently had the same question and can now help you out.  Asking questions, and equally as important, providing answers, via enterprise microblogging essentially turns your entire organization into a self-service support group.

You may be thinking, "Why don't I just search my intranet for the answer?"  It's a good question, and here are a few reasons why:

• Similar to a public Google search, intranet searches often return numerous results which are difficult to sift through to find what you need.
• Search results don't factor in the human traits like opinion and experience which your colleagues can provide.  
• Search is only good when you know what you're looking for.  If I want to find "Who is the Sales rep for the Acme account", an intranet search will probably be fine.  But an intranet search won't help me much with "Does anyone remember the name of the company that launched last week saying their engine is 10% faster than ours?"
• Search indexes don't (yet!) contain the information inside our heads.  I can't search the intranet for "Does anyone have connections with a graphic artist that could help us with our new website?"

As you can see, while search is useful, its not the only way to find the answers you're looking for.  If your company is not using enterprise microblogging today, the next time you're struggling to find an answer, ask yourself this question... "How do we get Socialtext Signals?"  (click here for the answer)

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)

I don't promote products often, but after 5 minutes looking at Zen, I wanted to tell people about it.



Zen is an online tool for project management that follows the Personal Kanban methodology.  I'm just starting to learn about this, but I can see how it could really help me manage my tasks.

Zen's UI is clean and gorgeous.  It is so easy to use that there is no need for training or help.  I found the selecting/highlighting of objects, collapse and expanding options, drag and drop, to all just work as I expected.

I highly encourage you to give Zen a try.

Some sound-bytes

• Enterprise 2.0 started with the adoption of web 2.0 technologies to meet enterprise requirements around security, privacy, etc.
• Initially a lot of the challenges customers focused on were: Where do I use it? How do I use it? How do I get adoption?
• At Socialtext we've always shifted that conversation to, How do you get business value from it?
• There will be ongoing pressure to provide integrated solutions, not point products
• Customer success and services will play a key part (best practices, templates, etc)
• Blending of different communication styles is important
• Providing collaboration with context that integrates with other enterprise systems is where things are going
• People are achieving transformative business value, not just innovation, by moving work across orgchart silos

There are some great little nuggets in this video:

• $1.5 billion is transacted between the US and Canada every day
• Canada is the second largest country in the world by land mass, yet has only 34 million people
• 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border
• Canada is the US's largest oil supplier
• If you're in a fight, you want the Canadians by your side
• On Sept 11/2001, 239 US bound flights with 33,000 passengers landed in Canada

President John F. Kennedy to the Canadian parliament in 1961: "Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder."

The best line is at the end "And Canada has a stronger and more sound economy"

The Opening Ceremony of the Olympics touched the hearts of Canadians in many ways. The emphasis on the First Nations people was wonderful.  The whales swimming across the floor of the stadium was incredible. (video now included in the comments below) But the most talked about segment (other than an arm of the torch not lifting) seems to be spoken-word poet Shane Koyczan's performance.  I can't find a clip from the Olympics, but here is Shane presenting a similar piece.


Full lyrics...

It may not mean as much to non-Canadians, but everyone I know was just beaming during this.  People tweeted, emailed, and txt'd me even before he was done.

"some say what defines us is something as simple as please and thank you and as for you’re welcome, well we say that too"
"we are an experiment going right for a change with influences that range from a to zed. and yes we say zed instead of zee"
"but don’t let your luggage define your travels each life unravels differently and experiences are what make up the colours of our tapestry"

The Canadian celebrity participants included actors, singers, humanitarians, and even an astronaut.  While not all are household names around the globe, for Canadians, many of these are our heros and inspirations.  This is not a full list, but some of the honoured were: Anne Murray, Barbara Ann Scott, Betty Fox, Bobby Orr, Bryan Adams, Catriona Le May Doan, Donald Sutherland, Jacques Villeneuve, Julie Payette, k.d. Lang, Loreena McKennitt, Nancy Greene-Raine, Nelly Furtado, Nikki Yanofsky, Rick Hansen, Romeo Dallaire, Sarah McLachlan, Steve Nash, and Wayne Gretzky.  Please let me know who I missed.

I hope being the host nation allows the world to discover that Canada has produced more than just Celine ;-)

Self-actualization: Preachy tweets expressing to the world how deep you can be.  Get a job at a greeting card company please.

Esteem: Ah, the joy of patting yourself on the back in public.  Yes, you're the best.  Thanks for sharing.

Love/belonging: Ego boosting messages subliminally targeted at the friends and family you hope are following you.  Guess what?  They are not.

Safety: Isn't it interesting how every vendor seems to be the best?  You're not.  My company is.

Physiological: Well, I'd rather read about food and sex, than some of the other bodily needs you could be telling us about.

Which are you guilty of?  I think I've done them all.

Today I read two very interesting stories about how the new generation of on-line services such as Facebook and Twitter are affecting people's lives.  At one end of the spectrum was Wil Wheaton, who blogged about how Twitter has changed his life and career for the better.  At the other end was the USA Today article about people shutting down their Facebook accounts to regain their privacy and peace of mind.  Both stories have valid points, and at various moments I've leaned in each direction.  There are times where I just want to completely disconnect and focus on the things "in my real life."  Then there are times that I'm so happy I was able to connect with someone on-line, make a business connection, or learn about something I otherwise would not have known about.

As with most things in life, finding proper balance somewhere in the middle is the goal, but a constant challenge.


While writing the paragraph above, I realized I'm wrong in thinking that "in real life" means being disconnected.  I work at home, physically disconnected from my teammates. So tools such as email, chat, microblogging, wikis, and webconferencing are standard tools of my everyday existence.  I have friends and family all over the world with whom I communicate primarily on-line.  I have "connections/friends/followers" that I met at periods in my life ranging from elementary school to events I attended last week.  I'm communicating with you right now via my blog.  

My "real life" includes being on-line.


The key (for me anyway) is to find the right mix of being behind the keyboard and away from it.  I'm quite active, and make sure to get outside, play sports, go to the gym, so physically I have good balance.  But emotionally I'm not sure I do.  I worry about what's in my inbox, my @replies, and comments on my blog.  So here are some questions I'm going to start regularly asking myself, you may want to as well.

• Do I need to read every post that flows through my Twitter or Facebook stream?
• Do I need to keep up with the news about every latest gadget or online service?
• Have I spoke to my mom this week?
• When was the last time I spoke to or saw my siblings, nephews, cousins, and aunts&uncles?
• When was the last time I spoke to my friends? (In Toronto, Boston, and a dozen other places)

I love the on-line world.  It's amazing that via status updates, chat channels, blogs and shared photos I'm able to "keep in touch" with so many people in my life.  But I also find it sad that I often know more about what's going on with acquaintances I met once at a conference, than I do about my closest family members and friends.  That is where I need to improve, and stop making excuses that I'm busy, especially if it is because I'm trying out the latest buzz of the week.

Friday night, I was one of the 8 Powerpoint Karaoke presenters at the closing party of Social Media Week Toronto.  The way it works, is you have to present a slide deck that you have never seen before.  Each slide is on screen for 40 seconds, and then advances automatically.  My topic was something about what to do when someone lies on the internet.  I'm just rambling in the clip below, but at the time it was the best I could do.

Here is the first video I've seen, if they share the full video I'll update this post.



It was a great event, and all the presenters were fantastic.  The night raised over $1000 for Sick Kids Hospital.  In addition to having fun, I meet some of Toronto's Social Media elite, so it was well worth the embarrassment.