Collaboration Cast

I think it would make a lot of sense for Novell to revive its Group Wise product by acquiring an Ajax collaboration vendor such as Zimbra. Novell’s decision to acquire SUSE has really paid off, not only in product relevance, but also in marketing relevance. Where Netware was becoming a platform of the past, with no future, SUSE allowed Netware customers to see a path towards a much more relevant and growth driven future.

Novell should learn from its success and do the same for Group Wise. I know they tried with Hula, but one thing Novell should know about itself: it has not been and is not very good at creating and marketing new products. On the other hand, the Zimbra team has been very good at innovating its email/collaboration platform and bringing new functionality such as voice, off-line client, and calendaring to its platform. Zimbra has built expertise around Ajax and has done a good job with its interface and Microsoft integration. Most importantly, Zimbra has done an excellent job with its marketing and brand recognition.

Novell is trying hard, but it is just not able to light the fire that is needed to keep customers and grow its Group Wise customer base. I believe that the addition of Zimbra would give Novell’s customers a attractive and relevant future and would also boost the Novell email partner base. Plus, it would give IBM and Microsoft a better challenge. The new injection of talent into the Novell system would hopefully also spark creativity and innovation with other Novell technologies. Novell needs more entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks to make the company a success.  The longer Novell waits to spark this fire and show its customers a relevant future, the longer Novell will lose credibility.

I would like to congratulate Novell on one thing, they are developing a good culture of acquiring open source technologies and making them a success. This should be one of Novell’s greatest strengths. Let others innovate and create the buzz then buy and further speed up the success and customer acquisition.

Hope Novell catches the vision and revives Group Wise.

RIA and Offline

This is the second time I have written about Adobe, but I have to truly say they are getting it right. Recently they released Flex 3.0 and Air. Now developers can use Flex to create rich internet applications (RIA) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application) with desktop-like functionality in the browser. With Air, developers can take their experience offline: this is the Holy Grail everyone wanted, but could not deliver. But the fun, vision, and magic does not stop there, Adobe is adding some new and exciting functionality to its development tools and application environment that will allow developers to take the power into their own hands and create applications that will help their customers become more productive, efficient, and connected. The story of Enterprise 3.0 will not be the vendor creating applications, but rather it will be about custom applications that businesses create with exceptional development tools. This blog includes a description of additional functionality to RIA and offline capabilities that will make up the developer tool kit of the future.

+ P2P

With Adobe’s acquisition of Amicima, (http://www.adobe.com/special/amicima/) they will be able to add Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) capabilities. With the addition of Amicima and the use of AIR’s offline capabilities, developers should be able to create P2P applications where users can not only have online access through a central server, but they could also choose to instant message, email, and share files and data directly with other users without a central server. Communication would be done from PC to PC, and data would be replicated from one user’s PC to another. This is a very powerful capability if you are building an application that requires security or if you want to save the user from paying monthly fees.

+ VOIP

Skype uses P2P functionality for VOIP, and several other bloggers have commented that Adobe’s acquisition of Amicima could position them as Skype’s biggest competitor. (http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/voip/adobe-flash-goes-voip.asp) Adding VOIP to Flex and Flash would further enhance a user’s experience. With VOIP integration, users would not only be able to call each other from a browser, but they would have a much richer VOIP client with AIR. The vision of unified collaboration would no longer be a vision that only companies or developers with deep pockets could afford. Using Adobe’s tools, developers would be able to build their own VOIP application that includes Skype-like functionality applied to a specific business process. Adobe is already making plans to deliver VOIP capabilities with its release of Flash player 10, and I am sure we are not far from more enhanced VOIP capabilities.

+ Web Conference

Adobe’s Acrobat Connect and Connect Pro are Adobe’s web conference tool, which currently is very expensive, but has rapidly grown in market share. Much of Adobe connects capabilities are also found in the Flash Media Player. In my previous blog, I listed several projects that already have started to build their own web conference tools with Flash. The one seminal part that is missing as part of the Flash Media Player, which Adobe has not released, is the ability to do desktop sharing. If Adobe releases this functionality in Flash, then developers will be able to build fancy and affordable custom real-time collaboration systems. Adding real time web conferencing to custom enterprise applications would help developers come steps closer to the enterprise 3.0 experience, where not only asynchronous collaboration is possible, but synchronous collaboration becomes a part of the every day work process and a dominating capability for virtual teams to collaborate and improve their productivity and efficiency.

+ 3D

The final capability I think is the coolest is the 3D rendering capability in Flash and Flex. Developers have already started creating 3D multi-player environments where multiple people can be online at the same time and collaborate virtually with each other in a 3D environment. Some examples of this include: (1) ISO Interactive’s Chamber of Chat, a 3D world for Harry Potter Fans (http://www.isointeractive.com/index.asp?page_id=119) and (2) Outsmarts 3D Room (http://dev.getoutsmart.com/os3d/demos/videoroom/)

Building 3D environments in Flash and Flex allows people to experience Second Life-like abilities in a browser without being required to install a client. The only problem is that rich 3D capability and the number of multi-players in a flash browser is limited, but with the addition of AIR and, hopefully soon, P2P, this limitation will be removed. Consequently, in the near future we may see the development of 3D team workspaces not only limited to Second Life, but we may see more of a 3D integrated environment build for a specific business application.

= Enterprise 3.0

Hopefully by now I have been able to create a vision of the development tools that developers will soon have in the future which will allow them to create Enterprise 3.0 applications. I can imagine a CRM application that is cross platform, has a rich internet interface, and is available offline for Mac, Windows, and Linux users. Users would not have to pay monthly hosting fees, because they would be connected to a peer-to-peer network. Additionally, real time collaboration would be enabled within the CRM tool for users to call customers, share presentations, and collaborate on RFP’s without leaving their application. Finally, search, team meetings, and socializing would be conducted in a 3D environment where users would be able to work remotely but feel like they are in the same room with colleagues. All this power and capability is made available to developers who can easily apply to a business application. Enterprise 3.0 will give the developers the power to create the tools their customers need. Why buy when you can easily build? No more yearly maintenance and upgrade protection fees. Reinvest money back into people and the company. This will be the mantra for the Enterprise 3.0 era.

While working at Novell, I led an initiative of trying to find a web conference vendor that would help us cut our web conference costs. I created my RFP (Request For Proposal) and sent it out to many web conference vendors. When the RFP came back, I was amazed to see how expensive it would be to purchase a web conferencing system for our 5000 person organization. Not only was the software expensive, but the consulting needed for implementation, training, and support was also very expensive. The lowest bargain I found was for $200,000, and the most expensive bid was for one million dollars. $200,000 was truly a remarkable deal compared to the rest of the vendors. Maintenance and upgrade protection was 15% of the cost: a significant price to pay yearly for the system.

Since leaving Novell, I have seen how easy it is to build a simple web conferencing tool that will meet the needs of 80% of a team’s requirements. Several people have built such tools on their own or with a team of two or three developers. Some examples of people who have built such tools include:

WebHuddle (www.webhuddle.com) - An open source web conference that was built by John McCaughey. John built the WebHuddle all by himself. WebHuddle was built in Java, is cross-platform, and does not require any downloads. WebHuddle is currently free and its source code is GPL.

Huddle (www.huddle.com) – A flash web conference system developed by an outsourcing company who works for Novell. A small number of developers, while I was at Novell, started building Huddle to meet some of Novell’s web conference needs. Huddle was first used for internal large group presentations and was slowly perfected. Unfortunately, at the time of the evaluation, the tool was still under development, but it has become a lot better and Huddle has successfully sold monthly subscriptions to small to medium businesses.

AV Chat (avchat.net) – A flash based web conferencing tool with Desktop sharing that was built in Romania. An unlimited license will cost you $299. AV Chat has desktop sharing: an impressive feature for a flash based system.
The most impressive of them is Openmeetings (http://code.google.com/p/openmeetings/): a web conference tool Sebastian Wagner built by himself in a few short months that already includes Video, Audio, Whiteboard, Document Importing, Invitations, and Public and Private conference rooms.

1VideoConference (www.1videoconference.com) - A peer-to-peer web conference system that is open source. They have integrated their product with Asterisk, an open source voice conferencing and PBX system. A team in India built 1videoconference. The open source project has 11 developers signup for the project.

These projects challenge the decision of paying $200,000 to half a million for a web conference system. It may be a very feasible strategy to use internal developers or outsource development to build a web conference system for your organization. Just the yearly maintenance cost alone could pay for a team who could manage and improve your own web conference system. Many of the above mentioned companies and individuals are willing to build such a system for your company.