These companies are providing solutions that will revolutionize the way you work. If you have an idea for a company that should be added to the list, please let me know.
August 26, 2006
System One is Web Office Technology
Thanks to Ismael Ghalimi, Jeff Nolan, and the Enterprise Irregulars, I have just been introduced to System One and Burno Haid's Journal.
System One is a platform, a company and one very cool piece of Wiki / productivity / information organization technology.
They have a System One screencast that is really worth checking, if for no other reason than to see how easy work flows could actually be.
June 23, 2006
Gliffy is Web Office Technology
In the past, I have said that Web Based replications of office applications are, to me, not that interesting.
Gliffy is the exception. Gliffy Rocks! Gliffy is an AJAX powered version of Visio. Except, it is easier to use than Visio and produces beautiful diagrams that look better than Visio diagrams. And they can be saved in the open, XML based SVG format.
Best of all, Gliffy diagrams are available as server based links to jpegs. That means you can update the diagram, and all your blog or wiki based documentation that references the diagram will be automatically updated.
So far, I have seen companies using Wikis for things like collaborating on Policy and Procedure documentation. Or, for tech companies, on software documentation. In both cases, the documentation within these Wikis includes diagrams. Gliffy now provides a fast way to update both the documentation and the associated diagrams.
Considering how professional and slick Gliffy is, I don't give them more than a month as an independent company.
Google and Microsoft should be looking at them now. I wonder if Don Campbell has seen this?
Here is my first Gliffy diagram:
On a separate note, I find it interesting that Microsoft has an open approachable Office 2007 evangelist blogger, like Don Campbell, who is willing to interact with the blogosphere.
Does anyone know who takes on this role for Google? Is there anyone at Google in this role? Or is Google only interested in collaborating with Googlers, and not with the blogging/Internet community as a whole?
Many thanks to Geoffery Millewich for pointing me to Gliffy.
May 15, 2006
Sphere is changing the game
If you haven't checked out Sphere yet, you need to.
Sphere is a mathematical search and semantic algorithm applied to the blogosphere. Sphere analyzes what any web page is talking about and then finds similar blog content.
They have been out for only two weeks and the success is pouring in.
Time magazine has already added Sphere to their website. For an example, check out this article on last night's speech by the President.
But it is Sphere's real time applications that are really amazing. Sphere gives you a tool for quickly finding out how much people are saying about a given topic right now.
If you are a Hedge Fund manager, if you are any kind of equity or credit manager, you need to start using Sphere NOW!
Check out this example of Sphere's range engine on a search for General Motors:
For fund managers, the point is the spike. If you check GM daily, you can see there was a spike around 4/10. Maybe that's around an earnings release, so it's not a big deal. However, if that's not the reason, something else is going on. Maybe something that will impact the stock price.
With bloggers, you do not have hundreds of journalists; you have tens of millions. The chance that bloggers will break any piece of news is increasing. And we all know that news impacts financial markets.
Sphere has an API. I am sure it won't be long before there are all sorts of live content mashups available that show you want people are suddenly starting to talk about.
Sphere has a bunch of other cool tools, including a related media and featured blogs.
The founders are Martin Remy, Steve Nieker and Tony Conrad.
BTW, a few posts ago, in response to my article on How to start a good business blog, Easton Ellsworth asked about how people track what's being said about their blogs. He also provided some great tips. My guess is that Sphere is going to be a valuable addition to the list.
April 20, 2006
Blogtronix is Web Office Technology
Blogtronix is the first example of an operating system in the cloud that I have ever had the pleasure of actually seeing work. Vassil Mladjov and his team truly understand the needs of a large enterprise when it comes to Web Office technology.
The Blogtronix system was built with enterprise users in mind from the ground up. Everything has access control. Everything has a stored history of changes. It is a full blown audit trail machine. Every post, every comment, every change is recorded. Everything is an object, which means you can create blogs and sub blogs with ease. Built on Microsoft's .Net platform, it will be both familiar and easily understood by the IT shops of large organizations.
Some of the most impressive features are much more basic. Blogtronix has a simple integrated AJAX powered authoring screen, which lets users drop literally any kind of web based content into the system. You just click a button and insert a file, a picture, a piece of FLASH directly into the post.
And I haven't mentioned anything about the built in statistics engine and reporting tools.
Imagine showing your boss that you wrote 54 posts in the last 6 months, with a total of 125,000 internal page views, and 636 comments from your co-workers and an average article rating of 4.8 out of 5 on a "This is useful" scale. These days, it is hard for knowledge workers to prove that they add value. Blogtronix will change that.
About the only thing that concerned me was the amazing abundance of features. Blogtronix is so far ahead of the curve, and so capable that it might prove too much for first time users. It's a nice problem for Vassil and his team to have. Vassil told me the solution was easy: "We just turn things off until they need it". The brilliance of the Blogtronix modular design shines through.
If you are trying to find a solution for internal enterprise blogging, you owe it to yourself to check out Blogtronix.
March 27, 2006
Zoho is Web Office Technology
Zoho is one of the few companies aiming to be not just a component of Web Office, but instead to offer a complete, integrated Web Office solution. They have many of the bits and pieces, including the large and important components, such as a blogging platform. They also have some whiz-bang interesting tools, such as an AJAX powered word-processor called Zoho Writer and a similar tool called Zoho Sheet. These tools prove that the Zoho team is capable.
However, as I have said before, I do not believe that most major companies will have much use for a web based word processor or spreadsheet. But, I think the Zoho team gets this point. Or at least, they get that Web Office is about extending the capabilities of existing tools, rather than simply replicating those tools on the web. Zoho's response is Zoho Creator. It isn't 100% ready for prime time, but Zoho Creator represents the wave of the future. With Zoho Creator, knowledge workers can easily create very simple list style applications in minutes. Keep track of the people donating blood in you blood bank (not sure about the privacy issues) or a To Do list.
The most amazing thing about Zoho Creator is that you can cut and paste your new mini application into your blog or wiki page.
Thus, Zoho Creator is an AJAX Badge that knowledge workers can use to build customized web based applications, which they can then deploy within the context of existing Web Office tools such as a Project Blog. Add a customized To Do list in one post. Add a customized Milestones list in another post.
To do this today, knowledge workers usually use Excel spreadsheets to keep track of these kinds of things. Zoho Creator changes the nature of the tools used to address the problem so significantly, that the existing MS Office tools are simply rendered irrelevant.
It is true that Zoho Creator has a long way to go. Issues like security and integrated access control need to be worked out. See Simple Cut & Paste Request for more details. However, they have made an interesting start.
March 18, 2006
eyeOS is Web Office Technology
eyeOS is the most breath taking web based desk-top I have ever seen. It is truly a thing a beauty. And it is open source. If you are interested in seeing how slick and how fluid a Web Office applicaiton could be, check out eyeOS.
Their amazing success so far, does, however point to something very important about Web Office. The eyeOS team has built a beautiful and very powerful AJAX / Javascript UI library. Now, they need to do something with it. Their OS needs a killer app, or it needs to be integrated into a killer app.
Most people already have MS Office. If they need another word processor to do real desk-top publishing, do, they'll do what I did, and buy an iMac and start to use Apple's Pages.
Regardless of how exactly it gets used, the eyeOS AJAX platform is clearly very impressive and well worth checking out.
BTW, I want to thank whoever runs Wolfwood's Crowd for pointing me to eyeOS in an article entitled Web OS. For me, this is one of those amazing examples of how the web brings people together. I am afraid I can't read their site because it is written in something other than English or French, but I was able to understand the headline and see the link to eyeOS.
Cognez is Web Office Technology
Cognez is totally in stealth mode. You can't see anything. But, you get a hint of what they are up to. Niall Cook is up to something. Something potentially very useful for enterprise users. Right now, he is revealing little, except for a couple of blog posts including The Case for Enterprise Bookmarking.
Here's his justification for social bookmarking within the enterprise:
Yet there are clear benefits to companies from using social bookmarking software across the organisation, for example:
- Research functions could share information about clients, prospects and industry trends
- Product development teams could collect and share product ideas and features
- Sales and marketing staff could gather consumer and competitive intelligence
- Public relations teams could share news coverage
- Management could quickly and easily see the collective intelligence of their organisation, and the connections between employees
I am looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.
March 16, 2006
Solve 360 is Web Office Technology
The company is called Norada. Their product is called Solve360. They make what they describe as an "Integrated Business Email Hosting and CRM Contact Management Solution". Their target market is small businesses, which puts them into direct competition with some heavy hitters, including all three components of GYM. However, there's something to be said for working with a team who can customize and extend their solution to meet your needs. After checking out their Solve 360 demo, it is clear that this team is capable of putting together a useful set of tools.
Mike Bader of Norada described some of Solve360's advanced features for me:
All of the functionality within our service is integrated, our platform was propose built from the start to facilitate the integration of disparate data-types into a single, usable application (before the term Web 2.0 was coined). For example, from within a contact you can see every email, event, task, file , IM, invoice, etc. that has ever been sent to that contact, all the data in the app is related on a contact and account level.
February 10, 2006
3Bubbles - An Ajax Badge Application
Planet Web 2.0 has an interesting article on a start-up called 3Bubbles.
Here's what Planet Web 2.0 says: "By simply adding a code snippet into the blog template, a link will be included in every post (think comments, trackbacks, and now chat) to open a chat window where readers can debate and discuss the post."
This is a perfect example of an AJAX Badge applciaiton.
February 1, 2006
Laszlo is Web Office Technology
Laszlo Systems and its Open Laszlo platform are clearly capable of forming the basis a complete Web Office suite of applications.
The Laszlo platform provides some of the richest web based interfaces I have ever seem. Laszlo combines AJAX with Flash to deliver everything from slide out menus and moving boxes to integrated music and video.
Laszlo Mail is an example of the kind of Web Office application that can be built with this technology.
I am not 100% clear whether Laszlo is going to become a provider of a complete Web Office Suite, or instead focus on offer the tools used to build a Web Office suite.
Clearly, most large firms will want to customize, extend and integrate their Web Office Suites into legacy applications and company specific systems. Given this, I am not sure what the market will value more: an out-of-the-box collection of enterprise Web 2.0 tools, or a platform that can be extended into anything. There will probably be room for both models.
January 30, 2006
CalendarHub is Web Office Technology
Calendar Hub is a brilliant piece of Web Office Technology. What makes it so important isn't actually it's core functionality. The online calendar tool is cool. However, what makes it really cool is it's Badge technology.
This is another AJAX moment folks. The people who make Calendar Hub are called BlueWire.
They have invented something that, I thin will be more important that AJAX in defining the true capabilities of Web Office / Web 2.0 and the amazing degree of empowerment it will bring to knowledge workers.
Badges are a magic combination of simple web authoring tools, such as a blog, or a Wiki, Ruby on Rails at the back end, and Javascript.
With Calendar Hub, you make your calendar entries, and then cut & paste some Javascript into your blog or wiki post. Suddenly, you have a dynamic little web application built into your page.
Calendars, interactive lists, polls, budgets, stock data. The list is endless. And as far as I know, you saw it at Calendar Hub first.
Many thanks to Ismael Ghalimi for pointing this one out.
January 14, 2006
Podzinger is Web Office Technology
Many thanks to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch for pointing this one out.
Podzinger converts podcasts into searchable text.
This is going to have the most amazing impact on enterprise use of Web Office technology.
You can already email your blog. Podzinger is the beginning of a technology that will give you the ability to leave a voice mail and have it posted on your blog. Or have the transcript of a conference call posted up.
Although blogging and Wikis have taken off on the public web, broad adoption within the enterprise is going to be a big challenge.
It is important to find as many ways for people to easily transition from the tools they use today to Web Office tools such as enterprise blogs and enterprise Wikis.
January 3, 2006
NetVibes is Web Office Technology
NetVibes is a web based AJAX powered start-page / RSS aggregator. NetVibes is dead simple to use, and very powerful. Within minutes, I was able to pull in an OPML file, and add all my favorite feeds.
An enterprise version of NetVibes could be used by executives to keep track of multiple internal project blogs, and track relevant external blogs and news sites. A slightly more powerful version of NetVibes would allow for customized internal widgets that could provide useful dash-board information, such as the stock price, inventory levels, or market values.
Some might ask what's new about NetVibes. Almost everything you can do on MyYahoo or on the Google customized home-page can be done on NetVibes. That's ture, but NetVibes makes it iPod easy.
NetVibes itself may not literally end up being a Web Office tool, but something similar, with NetVibes' easy UI will be a critical requirement for the ideal Web Office solution.
Many thanks to Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion for pointing me to NetVibes.
December 5, 2005
DocuSign is Web Office Technology
DocuSign
is a great example of the kind of service that will make Web Office Technology so very powerful. To get an idea of what they offer, I suggest checking out their docusign demo. It's a really interesting demo.This is the work flow:
1 - Load a document into the DocuSign Gateway On Demand Electronic Signature Service. (That's a really long name.) Basically it's a web site / web service.
2 - Go onto the site, and enter the email address of the person who is supposed to sign the document.
3 - Use a DocuSign AJAX powered UI to place a bunch of "Sign Here" and "Initial Here" tags on the document. This feels like dragging an electronic sticker over a pdf.
4 - Press send
5 - The signer receives an email that sends them to the DocuSign Gateway On Demand Electronic Signature Service. (The name really is too long.). The signer authenticates himself, and uses a similar AJAX powered UI to sign the document. The actual signature is actually a crude font print out of the signers name. Behind the scenes a digital signature is buried into the document.
At this point, you might be asking - how does DocuSign authenticate the signers? As far as I can tell, they don't. Instead, DocuSign provides you with the rock solid encryption and user ID / password technology. You are left to work out how to prove that user ID Robbie.Jones really is the person Dr. Robert Jones.
A 3rd party will eventually get this piece of the puzzle done right. It might be a series of banks with charge for the authentication. That would be a kind of insurance product. My guess is that Microsoft will once again try to own this space, but in the end, will fail because they do not have the bricks and mortar to ask for two forms of ID. Enmass, because authentication is a risk mitigation product, the banks make a natural fit. If not, it might be some start-up with Bio recognition cameras in Shopping Malls. "My face is my Mastercard."
Regardless, DocuSign provides a great example of how 3rd party services are quickly integrated into Web Office services. It gives an indication of the range of tools that will make up the Web Office Technology that will change the way we work.
Six Apart's MovableType is Web Office Technology
Six Apart's MoveableType is highly customizable, open, modular, rock-solid and used by thousands. It also powers this blog. Sixapart still needs to do some work to develop a version that will be a true success within the enterprise. Their to-do list includes developing LDAP integration, building administration tools capable of handling thousands of users, has tight email integration and improving the UI by adding a WYSIWYG tool. However, even with this work still to be done, MovableType is already a very compelling Web Office solution.
The true power of MovableType, however, is not only limited to blogs. MovableType can also be used as an RSS router, and as a tool for building semantic data during the course of normal business work-flows. MovableType's structure allows for the quick and easy addition of semantic pages. For example, a Bio Blog can be accompanied by a Bio XML file. As such, MovableType becomes an integrated HR management engine. A similar approach to clients takes MovableType into the CRM arena.
Socialtext is Web Office Technology
Ross Mayfield and his team have put together a really interesting and powerful tool. In many ways, Socialtext is one the closest things currently out there to a full blown Web Office solution in that it is already been used by some very large instituions, including Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Nokia, and Ziff Davis Media. Socialtext have email integration - you can email content into the Wiki. They also have put together a complete Socialtext appliance solution, making very easy for a conservative, security minded company to get up and running with minimal internal delays.
Zimbra is Web Office Technology
Think enterprise Gmail on steroids. The coolest things on Zimba include their hovers:
Date Hover: Hover over a date in an email and a little pop-up tells you what's on your calendar that day. The same thing works for words like "tomorrow", or "next Tuesday".
Name Hover: Hover over a name and it shows you that person's contact information. You get they phone number when you need it.
It looks like Zimbra is closer to the Web Office ideal, although they have some work to do before blogs and Wikis are tightly integrated into the platform. Emails are sorted archived and tagged. Personally, I think the tagging is overkill for email. It's too much work. But Zimbra's powerful search tools work regardless of whether you have tagged your mail. For enterprise clients to adopt something like Zimbra, they will have to focus on the obvious security issues. With that taken care of, the cost of ownership for a large Zimbra tool looks very cheap compared with thick client solutions. Zimbra does have one easy to fix problem. Their UI is a copy of Apple's brushed aluminum look and feel. It looks too heavy, and a little too complicated. A copy of Gmail's light look and feel will also look more professional. Minor comments on and otherwise stunning indication of what's to come.
I wonder if Microsoft is going to end up becoming a competitor or a buyer?
gOFFICE is Web Office Technology
GOffice has an amazing full-blown AJAX powered word processor. It looks like their plan is to build a complete office suite. A full Web Office environment will combine these rich interfaces with blog and Wiki tools, which are designed to share information, and most importantly, to search that information. Further, a the ideal Web Office solution will store detailed meta and or semantic data on each document or entity of information. GOffice isn't there, but their powerful user interface makes is an indication of what the Web Office of the future will feel like.
NumSum is Web Office Technology
NumSum proves that Web Office isn't only going to be about words. In fact, sharing numeric data will probably prove to be far more important. Numsum is taking a crack a sharing information through an AJAX enhanced Web interface. Obviously, this is a very early version, but it does represent an interesting beginning.
Writely is Web Office Technology
Writely has a a beautiful interface. It also gives an indication of how where information will live in a Web Office world. For many documents, it will make more sense to post them up on to some kind of server. The document is then stored in a searchable format, it's accessible by a large audience, and you can include access control tools, edit tools, and feed back tools. I am not sure how far it makes sense to take the document metaphor, however. It could be that in the Web Office framework, most documents are supplanted by Blog posts and Wiki entries. Regardless, the folks at Writely have put together a beautiful interface, with a good indication of what these web based tools can look like.
SalesForce is Web Office Technology
I haven't used the SalesForce.com solution yet, but I was shocked to meet someone the other day who was part of a company that only builds plug-ins and extensions to Sales Force. They have clearly created an interaction operating system that sits in distributed fashion on the web. Sales Force has the model that will come to dominate the future of web technology - software as a service, modular integration and true ease of use.
The only thing that concerns me about Sales Force, and this needs to be taken with a grain of salt, because I have not had the chance to work with their service yet, is their focus on designing tools to facilitate an existing and tightly defined process. Web Office technology is about two things, as Richard MacManus has so succinctly put it: read & write. In other words, Web Office technology has the potential to provide everyone in an organization with the tools to work directly and efficiently with everyone else in the organization. That's an impressive idea, and a big idea. It means both being about to communicate and being able to build little ad hoc processes for a given project. To build a true Web Office eco-system, Sales Force will need to make sure they focus as much of building tools to facilitate creation (the write part) as they do now on building tools to facilitate the consumption of content and the use of pre-defined processes (the read part).
That being said, SalesForce.com's success speaks for itself. The big thing that all similar Web Office Technology companies can learn from Sales Force is simple - figure out how to give your tool an open API. Even if you can't initially work out how you are going to generate revenue, make that open API. As soon as you create the open API, people will be creating Google Maps style mash-ups and Greasemonkey scripts that integrate with your service. When that happens, you have something big.
LinkedIn is Web Office Technology
If you have a career, you need to be on LinkedIn. It doesn't matter what industry you are in. It doesn't matter what you do. Eventually, LinkedIn will help you open a door, hire someone, establish a new contact. Take a look at Zimbra's Name hover functionality.
Now image a Greasemonkey plug-in that works with LinkedIn and shows you how you are connected to every name you see in cyberspace. Or maybe just to every name in your 100,000+ big company. Now, the barriers to working with people melt away.
I am not sure what LinkedIn's enterprise plans are, but some kind of service that automatically integrates with a enterprise web mail solution and extends what is available on the open internet version of LinkedIn, will eventually prove too useful for most companies to ignore.
LinkedIn has said that they do not want to create silos, and thus have argued against an enterprise version. I think there are easy ways to accomplish both LinkedIn's objectives and provide useful enterprise functionality. For example, an enterprise LinkedIn could work like a LinkedIn group.
A LinkedIn Enterprise server would automatically link everyone in the company into the group. An Enterprise version would integrate with the company LDAP server, and automatically walk employees through the process of getting a LinkedIn id.
Because the company pays for the enterprise version, the company could display a "certificate", indicating that anyone who claims to be part of the company group on LinkedIn, is really an employee. This certification would add value to both the company and to all LinkedIn users hoping to connect with the company.
LinkedIn also needs to add an API that hooks into their Enterprise Version. The API would enable the company to pull LinkedIn information into other internal applications. For example, a Zimbra style name hover that also shows how people were linked to the name mentioned in an email or on an internal enterprise blog would need that API.
None of this functionality is new, or not already available on LinkedIn, but an enterprise version would enable easier roll-out and use within a big company.
If LinkedIn doesn't make it, someone else will.
Gmail is Web Office Technology
Seriously, if you have not yet signed up for a Gmail account, you need to - if for no other reason than to see what all the talk is about. My guess is that Gmail's approach could save you hours every day. You will also see the application that started this whole Web 2.0 / Web Office phenomenon. An enterprise version of Gmail would provide Microsoft and IBM with an enormous amount of competition.
Enterprise Gmail, or any other enterprise Web Office email tool, could save companies time because it does not require sorting mail into folders. It would also increase security, as web based client would also offer the latest in virus protection.
But the integration capabilities are where it becomes truly interesting. There is no reason why a Gmail UI could not also be used to post to Enterprise Blogs and Wikis.
Backpack is Web Office Technology
Backpackit: If you want to see the future of project management, done with SCRUMs, in an emergent environment - take a look at Backpack. It's elegant, easy to use, and very useful. Right now, it has mainly a consumer focus, but it's business applications could be tremendous. The most amazing this about Backpack, might be the way it was built, using Ruby on Rails. Considering the recent memos from Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie, I am convinced Microsoft has taken a hard look at Backpack, realized how easy it was to build, and become seriously concerned about their future.
