Software Soapbox

Memory Lane via Edbrill.com: Netscape vs. IBM

There’s an interesting read via Ed Brill’s site about Netscape and Collabra.  Jamie Zawinski recounts Netscape’s in-house experience with groupware when they bought Collabra.  But his take on Groupware is somewhat simplistic:

"Groupware" is all about things like "workflow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from `unchecked' to `checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review."

Of course, there’s much more to collaboration and Groupware than just workflow, which was one of Collabra’s downfalls. 

What happened to my visitor stats?

Oh yeah.  It’s Lotusphere week and I’m not there…..

It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code. 
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code.
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code. 
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code.
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code. 
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code.
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code. 
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code.
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code. 
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code.
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code. 
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code.
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code. 
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code.
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code. 
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code.
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code. 
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code.
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code. 
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code.
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code. 
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code.
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code. 
It’s much more fun to be in Vegas writing code.

Nope, didn’t work.  after all the repetition, it still sounds like bullshit.  Oh well. 

Here’s a list of the lucky ones, and an RSS feed…..

A good comparison of collaboration strategies

IBM, Microsoft Chart Collaboration's Course.

At the hub of it all sit the industry's big guns, IBM and Microsoft. Both have been pushing collaboration aggressively this past year, launching new wares and services and, in particular, selling partners on the chance to create an unlimited number of solutions using their tools. From a technology perspective, the rivals' approaches vary (IBM hews to its server-side middleware foundation and a browser; Microsoft anchors collaboration at the desktop), but what both companies are doing has helped propel the market far beyond e-mail to a state of real-time collaboration and workflow that marries both front- and back-end data.

Good history of email

With way too long a title....

Social and Technical Interoperability, the Construction of Users, and "Arrested Closure": A Case Study of Networked Electronic Mail Development

Behind email's success lies a history of extended social interactions among ARPANET developers, programmers, and users from relatively heterogeneous backgrounds. An analysis of social identifications present in online discussions about email development found that inter-organizational computer networking allowed an increasingly wide variety of programmers and users to interact; assumptions about users to be openly stated and challenged; and the prototyping and testing of new technologies in heterogeneous social and technical contexts. Technical interoperation and its social analogue, social collaboration, became key challenges in the development of networked email and led to "arrested closure" in the form of flexible standards.

KM is now Search? No, Search is becoming KM....

Search is evolving to solve problems that KM solved, and just looks a lot like KM.  KM, in the meantime was absorbed into business processes and is no longer separately identifiable, as I wrote here.

Systems Management Pipeline

Knowledge management, you'll recall, was the Next Big Thing about four or five Things ago. Several big software companies, including the blue one, put a lot of time and money into PR hypeware that explained how their products would provide your enterprise with structured access to all your unstructured data. They even put a little money into software development.

Social Software – something old is new again

I have to say that this crusty old collaboration software geek was unimpressed with my first look at the "new" Social Software offerings. Wikis? Having worked with Lotus Notes and Domino for years and years I just couldn’t see anything new there.

I’ll even admit that Blogs didn’t really look that special the first time around. They reminded me of the first MS FrontPage templates I looked at way back in 1994. Remember those? They had four or five menu items along the top, usually titled “About Me”, “About this Site”, “My Photos”, “My Links, “ “My favorite Music”. Sound Familiar?

To someone who has been working with Lotus Notes Discussion databases, advanced collaboration software applications and Knowledge Management technologies for more than a decade, these new kids on the block looked like they had a lot of growing up to do before anyone would take them seriously.