New SalesForce.com Service is Yet Another Web 2.0 Proof Point

Read/Write Web reported yesterday that 'Salesforce.com Brings Web 2.0 To The Enterprise With ContentExchange': Today Salesforce.com announced a new product called Salesforce ContentExchange, a content management product for unstructured data such as email and html. They also publicly announced the acquisition of Koral, a web 2.0 content collaboration platform that was at DEMO07 earlier this year... Koral is a key enabling technology for Salesforce ContentExchange. The new product means that Salesforce.com now manages all types of content in a company - both structured information (e.g. CRM data like contacts and sales information) and unstructured information (office documents, HTML, video/audio files and email, etc). Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, calls this “another step towards our vision of managing all information on demand”.

So far, Web 2.0 migration into the enterprise world has seemed largely limited to the notion of enhanced content creation and sharing – for example, using a blog to add a human touch to a vendor/customer or management/employee relationship. Another example is using a wiki to create central repositories of information to which any employee can contribute, thereby exposing previously hidden but useful information. Both blogs and wikis are certainly '2.0' types of tools, and as such they are useful for sharing unstructured information associated with projects and processes. But they do nothing for structured information retrieval.

I think the SalesForce.com ContentExchange nicely reinforces what we at JackBe have been talking about for many months: a new level of ‘2.0 collaboration’ that empowers employees to share, access and interact with disparate information and data, both structured and unstructured. Check out the graph, stolen from one of our sales pitches, for an example. I think it's about delivering on the original promises of what Portals were aimed to do (but largely didn't do), and all in a 100% user-driven way.

Most business and knowledge worker tasks rely on access to the appropriate structured data in real, or near-real time. These information pieces are spread out across many enterprise applications, and databases. We as information workers are trapped in a world of monolithic siloed applications, each with its own login and password, access control policies, and confusing and user interfaces. Furthermore, because information is stored in different locations, the relation between the data is not obvious, and is usually only well understood by the information worker himself. It appears that SalesForce.com aims to change all that.

And, of course, JackBe's own Presto offers considerable efficiency potentials to the enterprise by presenting a user-driven consolidated view to both this disparate unstructured and structured information so to better respond to tacit activities. We think Presto will essentially redefine how information is located, consumed, and remixed as seen fit in the enterprise. Presto provides user insight and control of all accessible/governed information the knowledge worker needs to better respond to events. But enuf about my stuff for now.

Kudos to SalesForce.com.

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The Copernican Software Revolution ("Users are the Killer App")

Web 2.0 technology continues to shine the light on users. Luis Derechin, JackBe CEO, and I spoke on this topic several weeks ago at the AjaxWorld 2007 event in NYC in a presentation entitled "The User is the Killer App". I've been so busy working on getting Presto, our Enterprise Web 2.0 Platform and Mashup Environment out the door that I've been remiss in my blogging...well, I couldn't help but follow up on our talk with some comments, since I feel so strongly about the evolving role of users in every facet of next generation software.

Let me make the my point with a little review of history: In the year 1543, in what was considered a very controversial proposition, the Polish-born scientist Copernicus published a theory contradicting long-held views and conventional wisdom, proposing that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the Solar System. Such a model is called a "heliocentric" or sun-centered system.

In the Universe of software architecture over time we've seen numerous discussions focus around server-centric and client-centric architectures. From mainframes and dumb-terminals through the 1980's (server-centric), to Client-Server in the 80's and 90's (more client-centric), to Web-based in the 90's and into 2K (back to more server-centric), and RIA/Ajax-based applications today (back to more client-centric).

I think focusing on client or server in this equation is missing the point. Sure, the pendulum swings back and forth between the relative importance of client and server, but the pivot point from which this pendulum swings remains unmoved above...Imagine this pivot point as the user! Successful software must focus on the User, an approach best termed a "user-centric" or user-centered system.

Software should be user-centered in it's design and development, user-driven in its approach to integration and empowering in its collaboration models and support for ad-hoc, situational applications and mashups.

The evolution of User-Centric Software:

Last year I had the privilege of hearing Mark Hurst, Founder and President of Creative Good, a premiere User-Experience consulting firm, present on customer-focused strategies and he touched on a similar topic. Mark made the point that companies often fail to realize that the customer is the center of their universe.

As we’ve matured as technologists, our industry has continued to adopt a more user-focused approach to software development, an approach referred to now as Agile software development. Extending this focus even more broadly to create more “user-centric” and “user-driven” software is the next step in this natural evolution.

The term “Web 2.0” means different things to different people, but all definitions include one common theme: a strong focus on users. Consider the following features of the next generation of web software :

• User-driven content: the user of the software having more control over what data sources are utilized as part of their applications. It also implies more dynamic access to these data sources.
• User-driven selection/configuration: the software having more control of how information is labeled, categorized, as well as content layout, filtering and look and feel.
• User-driven integration: the user having more control over how various, disparate data sources are combined and transformed as well as how these data sources are utilized and manipulated within an application.

The overall emphasis is on a very dynamic user-driven model.

As we like to say at JackBe: "Users are the Killer App"!

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The Global Appeal of Ajax

A 2006 survey by Evan Data described the adoption of Ajax as higher in areas outside of North America. Perhaps like some of you, I regularly think that the technology world revolves around the United States. But once I got this idea stuck in my head, I started seeing evidence of the worldwide appeal of Ajax everywhere I looked.

Certainly, my own company has its share of Ajax customers outside of the good ole USA. And about half of the visitors to our website are typically from outside North America. JackBe's 'Ajax Best Practices' paper has been downloaded hundreds of times by people from as far away as Brazil, India, China, and New Zealand.

Why the trend? I think can summarize the collective wisdom of many of JackBe's customers by saying Ajax can help address thorny application deployment problems in remote areas of a company. Well-tuned Ajax applications are easier to deploy and can run much faster than typically-chatty client-server apps. In other words, a well-designed Ajax application can make a remote office into a viable business location without the need for on-site IT staff or heavy application deployment tools.

What's this mean to Ajax buyers? Philosophically, it just reinforces the idea that the Internet has all but eliminated the distance between sellers, buyers and ultimate users of Web-based technologies like Ajax. Practically speaking, I think this trend means many things. It should certainly be a reminder that your users can realistically be from anywhere on the globe. And on the flip side, you need to be open to the idea that your best Ajax partner/provider/implementor might not be (or need to be!) from Manhattan or Seattle.

We are now officially in a global village. Ajax is both part of the reason and one of the proof points.

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