Normal service has been resumed.

The BBC reports that Microsoft have walked away from the Yahoo bid.  Does this mean that Yahoo and Microsoft will at last start their engines and get back to producing something new and competitive or will they simply continue on the acquisition trail.  Come on you two…clean up your act and get back to work!

Same old problems.

I remember back in the late 1990s I worked on a project for GE to deploy Microsoft Exchange. GE at the time made a corporate decision to deploy a single messaging platform throughout the globe to overcome what they saw as a business communication problem. They used the analogy of a representative from GE Plastics walking past the representative from GE Lighting in the corridors of General Motors or Chrysler not knowing that they were both working for the same company with the same client and not being able to share any information. They believed that working together Plastics and Lighting could benefit the customer as well as GE. The case was compelling and the sponsorship of a single messaging platform came from the top, it had Jack Welch’s buy-in!

Reading Andrew McAfee’s post today I was reminded of this age and it occurred to me that we are still trying to solve this problem but this time the technology is Enterprise 2.0 and the use of Wikis and Blogs in a bid to reduce the use of email.

His students responses, in my view, are right on the button and his dissection of the responses make perfect sense. They mention cases where Wikis and Blogs can improve the collaboration between diverse businesses and teams within many different organisations, they highlight how collaboration and knowledge sharing can improve business processes, but I still can’t help thinking that whilst technology is evolving and we have new problems to solve, we’ve not fixed the problems that existed all those years ago.

Looking at it from another point of view, maybe we are solving the problem, but in stages. Email was the first step, but we are far from finished.

Tell me

Microsoft, yes Microsoft have launched a voice activated search application for the Blackberry, even before a Windows mobile version! Brushing over that fact, I have to say that I’d love to try it out, but being in the UK it seems I’ll have to wait.

Whilst in the US a couple of weeks ago, I played a lot of golf. Every [other] day we searched local golf courses for times and fees to get the best all round locations. Usually using a desktop/laptop, Google maps and a phone we canvassed local golf courses that met our criteria. As you can imagine, local in Florida is a 30 mile radius and golf courses in a 30 miles radius are plentiful. I’m not going to count.

I can really see how usefull this application can be especially when GPS is stable, fast and effective as it was in Florida.

In the meantime, I’ll be testing Yahoo oneSearch with voice support for Blackbery.

Microsoft Zimbra?

I really like Zimbra’s collaboration suite.  I remember looking into Zimbra, amongst others,  a few years ago when I decided to investigate what alternatives corporate Microsoft Exchange users had if they chose not to follow the MS Exchange road map.

At the time many of the alternatives available on the market lacked mobility, archiving and Outlook integration.  These were some of the criteria at the time.

The lack of functionality is no longer the case.  Zimbra now supports true push to Blackberry devices and also incorporates archiving and discovery.  The reality of moving from a Microsoft server platform is becoming reality.

Having said all that, look a little harder at the corporate level and you’ll see that Zimbra is owned by Yahoo and there is a possibility that this could all fall under a Microsoft brand in the future.  So what will become of Zimbra or indeed Exchange (which incidental is in need of a serious overall from the ground up)?

I can’t wait, but I fear we will all have to.

Search for search

Just over two years ago, I embarked on a project to deploy an Enterprise Search engine within the bank. I may have mentioned this before.

During the period of evaluations and proof of concepts, I attended a few seminars and a couple of meetings with Microsoft who were embarking on repackaging their legacy index server as a search engine delivered with Sharepoint.

I documented my findings from these meetings along with other comparisons and conclusions from the products we looked at, unfortunately they are located on the internal wiki and cannot be referenced here. In any case,my findings were in summary, that Microsoft were making a poor and reactive attempt to compete with Google in the Enterprise. Their only hope would be to either go back to the drawing board, in which case they would be late to the market if they were to bring anything innovative to market or acquire a established Enterprise product.

That was around early 2005 and low and behold, here we are in early 2008!

Personally,I think this is a good move. Not sure about the timing commercially, but financially, yes! Let see what Microsoft decide to do with it.

Calm down dear, it’s only commercial.

I recently suffered a hard drive failure on a machine I’ve had for about two years. It was an IBM laptop running Windows XP with Office and a bunch of other applications that I really can’t remember now. I haven’t lost my memory, it’s just that I haven’t used the applications installed on the laptop for some time. The reason for that is I began migrate myself from the desktop to the web, or from private to public or from 1.0 to 2.0.

My documents, photos, music are now all stored in a cloud somewhere accessible anywhere, anytime.

So suffering a hard disk crash wasn’t the life crippling experience it used to be. In fact, a couple of set backs I can think of was thinking about what capacity drive to purchase and of course the lengthy delay of rebuilding the OS and subsequent security patches.

Let’s face it, I really only need a browser nowadays to communicate and collaborate and of course I have a few choices.

It did cross my mind to move away from a Microsoft environment on the laptop and look to Ubuntu or even attempt to install Apple’s OS X (Leopard) instead. In fact as I write this (on my Powerbook) I’ve decided to go for it and enter the twilight-zone… OS X via a Thinkpad!

Anyway, the point of my post. I guess I’m ‘hip‘ as they say. I can survive in a world of software as a service and even in a non Microsoft world.

I’ll let you know how I get on with this challenge.

Consumer to Enterprise

I’ve been thinking around the topic of consumer meets enterprise for a couple of years now. For one it makes my job easier within the enterprise, but exciting at the same time as I strive to drive change, lower costs and keep it simple.

When a disruptive technology takes off in the consumer space I immediately look at the uses and benefits that it could bring to the enterprise. Take Instant Messaging and SMS, these are technologies that tried to fight their way into the enterprise but failed until another generation took it and grew it organically as they entered the enterprise.

This is a hot topic at the moment as we now hear about the darling of the enterprise; Microsoft buying a stake in Facebook. There’s more to this and potentially a brilliant opportunity for the enterprise. On the face of it, there are many questions how a social networking site can be beneficial to an organisation such as mine, I’m not trying to answer those, I am more interested in the simplicity and value of the concept to our organisation.

I don’t know a great deal about CRM, because I do not use one regularly in my role per se, but I know why we have a CRM. In my opinion, our CRM is under used. Everyone in the organisation should be using it. It should build a network of relationships similar to LinkedIn, it should be used to build internal relationships as well as external relationships, there’s much more potential for the CRM platform across the entire organisation and I believe we are about to see a change in this space with the immense popularity of social networking and the recent alliance between Microsoft and Facebook.

Here’s my train of thought. Microsoft have publicly announced their willingness to embrace Web 2.0 applications and their dominance in the enterprise provides an existing loyal customer base to capitalise on. Of course their current cash cow in the enterprise is the Office and Backoffice (Exchange, Operating Systems, SQL etc.) packaged software, but this is not competitive against the likes of Google Apps and Salesforce.com, Microsoft have to ‘embrace and extend’ Web 2.0.

Software as a service (Saas) as it’s now called (a.k.a , ASP, hosted, managed, utility services) is certainly the way to go for commodity services, but two things will affect the adoption. Security and Compliance. Whilst it solves the overhead of licensing and license management, it has to meet or exceed the regulatory requirements. This is where Google is finding it difficult to persuade the enterprise to embrace the Google Enterprise offerings. Microsoft, however, know this area very well and as a result are likely to design with this in mind.

Right now we have Windowslive.com but this is certainly Microsoft’s answer to Google Apps. I believe Microsoft is building a strategy to help guide their loyal enterprise base firmly into the 3.0 era.

Of course the alliance with Facebook is about increasing their revenue but out of this will bring opportunities for the enterprise in the guise of a new paradigm of enterprise social networks and collaboration tools with self service security features. Maybe this is what Enterprise 3.0 is all about and pioneers such as Microsoft and Facebook will be the enablers.

Rather than build it in-house, I would like to see LinkedIn and Facebook adapted into the enterprise as the new CRM. Add ‘presence’ to this network and immediately we have the potential for a tacit knowledge\social network within an enterprise.

I’m just trying to figure out how I can play a part in this new wave. It’s time to change and I’m up for it. I need like minded individuals to join me in developing some ideas to market.