derek abdinor

I recently had the need to get information on Vignette (story server) in a hurry, and followed a certain methodology which is no doubt common to many.

In order:

1. Google
2. Vignette’s site
3. Wikipedia
4. Phone dev friends
5. Twitter
6. Post a question on LinkedIn

You could seperate the first 3 into old-style information harvesting (even wikipedia), #4 into common sense, and #5 and #6 into “leveraging social media”. Well, the winner by a country mile for answers was LinkedIn! Let me share with you those that were public answers:

Vignette server: difficult to develop a website on top of it or not?

Answers

Krishna Kumar: Sr. Vice President & Group Editor – DARE at CyberMedia India Ltd
If you are talking fo getting it done by a consultant, that can be costly.

And the cost may have nothing to do with the complexity.

Vignette is supposed to be one of the most scalael and highend content servers out there, having hosted sites for Olympics, etc.

The server (plus various additional modules) itself is very costly. And consultants with experience on vignette do not come cheap

kkkg

Eric Small: Director, Consumer Product, with extensive technology background, focus on web communities and UGC
If you’re at the point you’re even asking this question, you’ve got a difficult task ahead of you. Vignette, or any enterprise-level CMS, is meant to solve the problem of large-scale content management. By and large, when you get to this point, your web site is going to be complex (and thus difficult). Otherwise you wouldn’t be considering spending that much $$$.

Use the CMS Watch report at www.cmswatch.com/cms/report/ to make sure you’re getting the right vendor. And get someone in your organization to read the CMS Bible by Boiko (ISBN 978-0764573712) to get a good sense of the process of building out a CMS-driven system. If you have the leverage (and you should with this kind of investment) insist on a prototype before signing on the dotted line.

By the way, if all of this seems out-of-scale for what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be looking at Vignette. For smaller implementations there are good open-source solutions like Drupal and OpenCMS.

Luis Mendez: Solutions Architect
Vignette can be very complex. But this will be the case with any combination of portal server, web server, application server, content management server, and dynamic business objects delivering along with search, security, and high performance environment.

It really depends on how you want to foray into the Vignette products themselves.

On one hand, you can use the Vignette out of the box content managers and have everything sent out via RSS, XML and so forth. That’s easy assuming all content management is done through the apps that come preconfigured out of the box.

On the other hand, doing things like delivering secured data with integrated directories and other ACLs on both the content management and the content delivery is another bowl of wax.

There are of course other issues to deal with such as client side request through frameworks like AJAX, how portlets communicate with one another in multiple states and how all of that translates into where you content is going to come from.

Getting a Vignette consultant on board would be an expensive proposition because they can help you traverse all of these topics. They are typically well versed in all areas of the web and then some!

===/===
What did we learn? That LinkedIn is powerful as it filters a lot of the noise and is targeted at professionals,  that you will get an answer from strangers and friends alike and that anyone wanting hard skills in this economy should hit the Vignette books. Thanks all!

Some think that loadshedding came at the right time, to force people to save power and start thinking along sustainable lines: perhaps even to get back to traditional ways of spending time together.

The same has been bandied about about high petrol (gas) prices.  Raise the price, get people to drive less (less carbon, less demand, build public transport); it all sounds quite sane. Even the apparent side-issue, that the government gets the exponential tax, is worth all the trouble.

That’s what I thought, until I read up on the issue, including Freakonomics articles.

Higher oil prices means more incentive and resources to go looking for oil (in business terms). More supply means the dance of supply and demand could be in full swing. The point is that the same amount of gas will be consumed regardless. The environmental impact of drilling and extracting oil and polluting air, has not lessened or stood still. It grows regardless.

There was a comment that government needs to tax consumers, but also suppliers, punitively. This money can be used somehow, somewhere. That would be another issue to fight.

I was kindly invited by James Governor (aka Monkchips) of Redmonk, to participate in a pre-conference Wiki, OpenAccountability. James is hyper-passionate about sustainability and web2, and doesn’t mince words or dialectics; I foresee him turning his dab hand to shareholder activism in time. I posted there, thought it would fit here too…

Corporate communication tends to follow a linear trail, a harbinger from the days when paper + letterhead + signature = legitimacy. It is requirement to communicate to all one’s shareholders as a matter of good governance, updating your investors on their investments and punting the company line into the marketplace as a cumulative benefit. The media that spring to mind here are the mailed reports, EDGAR filings and letters to shareholders.

However, lets scrutinise the company’s annual general meeting (AGM). The company publishes a notice to the AGM (usually as an addendum to the annual report) and sets out the agenda for which shareholders can vote at the AGM. These include appointment of directors, adoption of some matters of course but also how the board sets about allocating shares and profit. Very rarely are matters of strategic direction entertained at the AGM; it is assumed the board enjoys the confidence of the shareholders to do just that (much like cabinet and the president/PM).

WIth globalisation and cross-shareholding, voting by proxy accounts for a huge whack of all votes cast at the AGM. This is now moving into the online space to do away with paper and the attendant inefficiencies.

But why is this not more of a collaborative exercise? The agenda is set by the board, about the board, for the board. Why could a company not open a Wiki or Ideastorm to the shareholding public to know what issues they want to discuss? Those suggestions could be tallied by some impartial body (the Bourse, auditors, etc) and brought into the AGM.

This is how I see Web2 thinking infiltrating corporate culture, or rather capitalist culture. Business spend kaZillions on R+D and talent sourcing but assume those that invested in them will be satisfied with some paltry pre-defined choices? With the markets as they are, dialogue with potential investors is about sustainability and survival. Web2 is the key to that kingdom.

I was digging through some old files and found my old blogger install file. I had an account on Geocities (Yahoo!) from 1998 and uploaded my CV to it, and then dabbled with blogger in 2000. I didn’t update it for many years and Yahoo! closed the account.

Just for kicks and posterior analytics, here are my first blog posts.

Great research conducted by Brodeur, found via Valerie’s blog. I think the analysis is clear to understand from the stats alone:

• The biggest impact of blogs is in the speed and availability of news.
• Over half also said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.

We’d like to think that news reporting is completely unemotional and factual. Research should uncover those factual data points, although I hear all the time from contacts I have in the news business that research budgets are being cut. What sells in my experience is the human connection, the story, and in regional markets the local angle.

That is why nearly 70 percent of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. And a total of nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week.

Journalists are increasingly active participants in the blogosphere. One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs and nearly one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page. About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” — reading blogs but rarely commenting.

Following on the heels (or should that be the leap that wasn’t pre-looked) of Facebook’s consumer advertising platform Beacon, Amazon has allowed its users to build up records of what they’ve bought and share it with people (friends) on Amazon. Obviously the big prize here is not accumulating friends like other social networks, but actual consumer items. Ca-swipe!

Amazon is one of the companies that deploys simple business ideas and are probably a step behind the early adopters. Their user reviews and comparison purchases model was peer-production and user generated content (UGC) before they became buzzwords. Now this. Their efforts in cloud computing also brand them as a player in the post W2 world.

The Queen held out for a while, but finally opened the royal channel on YouTube. Clever to open it during the lull in the news, and also kudos to her PR for doing so.

Geek and Poke toon below

Serena software, developers of lifecycle management systems and the conceptualisers behind “Facebook Fridays“, embody the spirit of Enterprise social media: they take ideas from the user phenomenon of social media (w2) and apply it to the enterprise with remarkable results.

They’ve adapted the retail and sociological ideas of the Long Tail into how it is relevant for the organisations’ internal mechanisms. And it fits.

The Long Tail theory is essentially that the web is so vast, one can satisfy niche desires without creating uncostly overheads ie: you can sell something of little demand, and also sell that of massive demand simply because storage, and shipping in the online world is not a factor. The same is true of media: some blogs and op-ed pieces have great following, however it does not detract or disqualify from blogs with small audiences. They can co-exist, unlike in the old media world where there are costs and economies of scale associated with any publication.

The way this works in the enterprise is thus: IT has large, visible and critical applications that it has to occupy itself with at any given time. Other needs have to wait, get political backing or get in the queue. However, the influx of digital natives and social media have made knowledge workers competent enought to create their own simple applications or use existing web applications or services that come free.

In order to aid and abet this, Serena has introduced a Mashup Composer. Althought I’ve not played with it, it appears to be something along the lines of Yahoo! Pipes and the Google open APIs. Think of it as the guy in Accounts who had cred because he could write macros. And who replicated himself.

This new approach enables power users in the business and IT to quickly address their everyday needs, while freeing scarce application development resources to focus on more complex tasks.

IT concerns? Of course. The mashups will be built on top of existing architecture, and it seems like it will consume existing web services rather than write to critical databases.

Next Fifteen Communications Group’s annual report claims to be the first to incorporate weblog functionality into it.

‘We have an opportunity to expand the role of the annual report,’ comments Tim Dyson, chief executive of Next Fifteen. ‘We can transform it from a relatively dry summary of what’s gone on over the last year into a means of having a dialogue with our shareholders about all of the issues that the report raises.’

On the annual report microsite, one has a link (in a few sections) linking to a standalone page with a post, allowing comment.

and this links to another different page (new window):

Well done. As one who works in corporate communications. I was wondering when someone would attempt this. Merging investor relations with social media/enterprise 2.0 is a keen interest of mine.

Having said that, I feel some opportunities were missed (I would say that, wouldn’t I?).

1. The blog should be part of the annual report.
Pop-up, pop-out, ajax, iframe: whatever. You cannot post alongside it, you have to open a window to a different site. I pictured reading a page and seeing all the commentary beneath it, instead the post is not part of the annual report (ie: not signed off by the auditors).

2. It says blog but somehow doesn’t feel like it

• No RSS feeds, so one can’t be updated by the blog, one has to visit the page. Enough to disqualify it as a blog per se
• This is a homemade blog if you inspect the code. Valiant effort, but font tags and not half as well optimised as the usual blogging engines
• The links to Digg and Delicious would make IR novices more familiar if you used icons or a whats this?
• No trackbacks or comments RSS – not serious

3. Feels too controlled

Found out about this the same day as the BlogCouncil. This feels like a good IR idea that somehow got hijacked by legal and company secretarial. Written in ASP.Net code goes some way to explaining. Lose the lawyers in the brief, and get some PHP cowboys in.

Nevertheless, congratulations to Next 15. Here’s to seeing more uses of social media in IR!