My two cents on Google Wave

We all face the same challenge: too much communication. E-mail overflow, status updates on Facebook, Tweets, blogs, RSS. All scattered around on the internet. We might have embraced these new communication technologies a bit too much. That it what Google might be thinking when they started the development of Wave almost two years ago.

Wave is supposed to solve the ever increasing tsunami of data. Being active in the introduction of an internal social network I whole-hearted agree with these imputations. One of the main topics of discussion there is the fact that people do not want to have more tools to communicate, they want less. So obviously I was eager to find out what Google Wave has to offer. And let’s face it, e-mail is soooo 1995…

First let’s have a look at what Google Wave actually is. I couldn’t find ‘Google Wave in Plain English’, so I’ll give it a try myself (alternatively you can watch the entire keynote -1 hours, 27 minutes, see below- looking at two dreadfully bad presenters in which they explain the entire thing. Recommended for New Media Specialists or if you want to play guru at parties).

In the basis Google Wave is a centralization of all forms of communication. Because of this centralization you can do cool stuff, as we will see later. When compared to ‘traditional’ e-mail (see picture 1) which is basically a copy of the snail mail concept, Google Wave connects everybody on one server (see picture 2).

Picture 1 - The traditional way e-mail works (courtesy of Google)

Picture 2 - The Google Wave way (courtesy of Google)

What is Google Wave?

The information Google is providing is not too much, mainly because Google Wave is still in development. The keynote presentation (yes, I did watch it) reveals the following features:

A Wave can be compared to a sort of e-mail message on steroids. Looking at the interfce of Wave, you see a navigation on the upper left side (with inbox, archive, etc), Contact list on the lower left side, A pane in the middle with your ‘Waves’ and on the right side the selected Wave.

Plain vanilla e-mail is done by creating a new Wave, dragging your contact in the wave and start typing. When the recipient receives the Wave it can reply. Nothing new here. But the cool thing is that one can reply on paragraphs within the mail and start a conversation based on this specific paragraph. So you get a conversation within a conversation. All visually stunning and easy to see. But now the cool part comes: whenever the sender is typing her message, the recipient, if online and looking at the same Wave, can actually see the sender typing. Sort if instant messaging, but without the message ‘xxx is typing….‘. Of course, if you want to give your love message a bit more thought you can switch this off and use the traditional ’send’ button.

Dragging pics into your Wave is as easy as drag and drop. Also here the recipient sees the pictures arriving the moment the sender drags them into the Wave. Impressive stuff, also if you realize that all is done within the browser. No additional software is required.

If you want to name the pictures, you can of course do so. And again, whenever you add text to a picture, the other person can watch it ‘live’. But Google has built in an even neater trick. The recipient can start adding text too, and then the sender sees it automatically. In this way you can really work collaboratively on a document (as opposed to the dreadful way Microsoft has implemented this in Word).

Sometimes e-mail threads can become pretty long. Ever received an e-mail of twenty pages, where you have to scroll all the way down to start reading? With Wave, where people can start a conversation within a Wave, things don’t get any clearer. Fortunately Google has thought of that too. There’s a playback button on each Wave, and a timeline. Just press the ‘Play’ button or drag the timeline and see the Wave being build up from scratch. See who replied on who, and when. Handy stuff.

A Wave can be embedded in a blog, wiki or any other website. So when you embed your Wave, it’s there to see for the world. Basically you can take your conversation public, viral. Whenever people react to your Wave on the embedded website it is shown on the website itself, but also in your original Wave. Same goes for Twitter. A nice integration with our all time favorite microblogging platform makes it convenient to have your tweets together with your e-mails…eeehh… Waves. Just imagine what this could do for enterprises, building up a massive knowledge database automatically.

Another nifty feature is autocorrection based on Google’s language database (should be pretty big by now) and, guaranteed WOW effect, autotranslation. Somebody is typing in French and it is automatically -on the fly- translated in English. Google Wave, where were you when I was on High School? Using these features involves including a ‘Robot’ in your Wave. Just like including people in your Wave you can add these Robots (little pieces of software) which enhances your Wave. A bit scary may be for novel users but -depending of the Robot’s feautures- proving very helpful eventually.

Wave is open source, so all can start making applications. Next to that companies can install Wave software independently from Google so that communication never has to go through Google servers and stays within the group you decide to share. Clever, Google, clever.

There is much, much more to tell about Wave, but I suggest you grab some popcorn and a bottle of beer and start watching the presentation:

So, will Google Wave have a future?

From a collaboration point of view I certainly saw some very nice features. Collaboration within a Wave, dragging just another person to the Wave if you want to get involvement, conversations within a Wave, adding features with Robots, taking the conversation outside the Wave. All features which will bring a rich user experience and endless possibilities. But the main challenge will -in my opinion- be twofold:

1. User adoption
2. Lock-in by Google

1. User adoption
Google Wave has a strong competitor. A competitor which is so adopted within society, from a cultural as well as a technological point of view: e-mail. And why is e-mail so strong? Simply because we all have it, we all know how to use it (which is obvious when I look at the number of e-mails in my inbox) and because the technology is not owned by anybody. So the success of Wave -any new technology for that matter- depends on the adoption and thus on the number of people using it. If nobody has Wave, with whom will I dance the Wave? Google of course realizes this, hence the decision to make it open source. They want as many people as possible to try, build and embrace it. Hoping for a tipping point.

But will my mother use it? Will she see the benefits of online collaboration? Will she take effort to go through the rather steep learning curve? I just don’t know. For the average Digital Native this won’t be any issue. But mind you, there are still a lot of Digital Immigrants out there, and they feel perfectly okay using e-mail. Even so, it is not too long ago that they mastered e-mail and I’m not sure whether they want to go through that again.

And what about corporations? More efficient communication, building up knowledge collectively, online collaboration. Which CEO doesn’t want that? But what a minute… this is technology from Google, isn’t it?

2. Lock-in by Google
In a recent Wired article (August 2009) it is explained why Google is set on a collision course with the US antitrust division. Being seen as the ‘new Microsoft’, the recently appointed head of Justice Department’s antitrust division Christine Varney is sure to investigate the accusations Google has received from various parties. According to Varney “[Microsoft] is not the problem. I think we are going to continually see a problem, potentially with Google”.

Whether these accusations are all true or not, nobody can deny that Google has gotten some power over the years. And in general society doesn’t like such powerhouses. I can imagine that also companies are reluctant to use technology which on paper might be open source, but you just never know.

In conclusion I think Google Wave could potentially be very big. It certainly has all the ingredients to become the next iteration of online conversations. I’m not so sure about adoption, which is the main critical success factor. I will certainly give it a try when it becomes available later this year, and I advise you do the same. If it was only for playing the early-adopter guru amongst your friends.

Additional reading:

First Impressions of Google Wavers, by Dion Hinchcliffe

What works: The Wave Way vs. the Web Way by Anil Dash

Does your company have a Facebook, blog or wiki?

The National Marketing Day in the Netherlands proved once again that marketing without the term ’social’ is to no use. Well, talking about it actually. As hungry hyenas the Dutch marketers swallowed all with the name extension ‘2.0′. And the dutch marketers are not the only ones. We see this happening all over the world. Whether that is a good of bad thing is part of another, much broader discussion. Fact remains that companies now suddenly see that having conversations with their customers, preferably authentic and transparent, could prove extremely important. And that’s always a good thing.

But what about those employees of these ‘2.0-savvy’ companies? Or even those ‘1.0′ companies, still figuring out these new trends? To which extend has 2.0 communication penetrated within organizations? Let’s be honest. If 2.0 means that people create stuff in an open, constructive and transparent way it shouldn’t be difficult to imagine that companies jump into this like they did into Web 2.0. Which manager doesn’t want to have employees who perform much more in less time and come up with real customer-focussed products and services? And have fun along the way, too? At last, Cubicle Utopia!

Unfortunately, things won’t change overnight. But changes are imminent, that’s for sure. The rise of Generation Y/Millenials/Generation Facebook/Digital Natives (basically all the same) within the walls of corporations determines for a great deal the way we are communicating (or are going to communicate) between colleagues and higher management.This is the generation that doesn’t know that you could ‘dial’ on a phone and that music was distributed on a kind of plastic called ‘vinyl’. MP3, computer, internet, 24/7 availability and Facebook have found a place in their vocabulary. This will be the generation pulling the strings soon. And may be soon is sooner than you think. In the Netherlands 800,000 babyboomers will have to be replaced by only 450,000 GenY-ers. And in the US half of the workforce is marked GenY at the end of 2010.

What does this all mean for communication and collaboration? Time to find out on the fourth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, USA.

Enterprise 2.0

The number of participants going to the Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) Conference is growing steadily. No surprise, because in six tracks the organization promises all kind of inspiring sessions. How about ‘Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change’, or ‘How to Build Collaborative Software That People Will Actually Use’? And let’s not forget ‘The Evening in the Cloud’. With these kind of titles I at leas was intruiged. Started three years ago with only 750 participants, now the world’s biggest event on Enterprise 2.0 with this year more than 1,500 participant of various nationalities (though no Duchies, to our knowledge).

Dion Hinchcliffe started the program on Monday morning with a three hour session about the current status of E2.0. Dion should know, since he is blogger on the popular ZDNet, has his own Enterprise 2.0 show, is President and CTO of his own consultancy Hinchcliffe & Company and in his spare time set up Web 2.0 University. A busy bee, to say the least. Passionately Dion explains that social media tools such as blogs and wikis are more or less accepted by the mass and that in some way many organizations are already experimenting. Mainly because for many people the border between work and private life is diminishing. Employees work from home and ‘Facebook’ at work. “But”, as he explains, “we are at the beginning of the curve. Plenty of opportunity to improve.” And to what should we pay attention, according to Dion? “Community Management, social media guidelines for employees, change management, increasing acceptance and measuring results are focal areas which every company starting with E2.0 should take very seriously.”

Results don’t lie. A sound E2.0 program may gain a better distribution and usage of knowledge, increased productivity (in some cases even more than 20%), transparent business processes and improved innovation. The advantages of E.0 are plenty, and Forrester Research estimates that this market will have a value of $4.3 billion in 2012. “Most probably this will be even more”, said an optimistic Hichcliffe.

But aside these halleluja-stories of course also challenges lie ahead. Plenty of challenges. Many of these challenges were discussed in most presentations and can be, in my opinion, broken down into the following subjects:

Safety
Company data not on the company servers, but outside the firwall. Very scary for most companies. Put many servers together and call it ‘The Cloud’. Cloud Computing is hot, sufficiently hot to dedicate an entire evening to this subject. In a panel discussion between users of cloud solutions and vendors (such as Google, IBM and EMC) it became obviously clear that there are many advantages (among other things scalibility, flexibility and lower costs) but that a healthy distrust remains. “I want to know exactly where your servers are located. Not somewhere in a country with a doubtful regime”, said a user to Rajen Seth, the inventor and developer of Google Apps.

Acceptation by policy makers
Making policy can be interpreted in many ways. For E2.0 roughly four groups play a significant role: Human Resources, Corporate Communications, Higher Management and IT. And not all are equally convinced about the advantages of E2.0.

A nice example from the audience: “My company loves video. We even have our own Youtube channel to inform our customers. However, when I type ‘www.youtube.com’ in my browser the site is blocked by IT. And thus I have to watch these company videos on my own computer at home. Still many companies do not understand that the majority of the employees can be trusted and can use tools like Youtube and Facebook in an honest way, perfectly in line with corporate guidelines. A nice lecture about this from Metthew Fraser, co-author of the book ‘Throwing Sheep In The Boardroom: How Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World’.

“Human Resources prefers to talk to customers instead of with customers”. said a frustrated Fraser. And this is exactly what I see around me all the time. Don’t expect any help from Corporate Communications either. Fixated in old thinking patterns most organizations still send out press releases in the name of… yeah, in whoms name anyway? “Just send this out in the name of a true person, with a face, and so”, Fraser preaches.

The co-operation with IT is a different story altogether. I wrote in a previous blogpost that in general IT is not first in line to implement these new tools. That I wasn’t alone with my hypothesis became clear on this congress. At most, if not all lectures IT was mentioned as the major hurdle to take. Reason for this is beyond my understanding. Of course I understand the fear of placing data outside the firewall. But one should think that IT, of all disciplines, should jump on board of these new and exciting IT-related developments? Don’t get me wrong, there were a few examples where IT was not the problem, and even a catalyst to get things done. But these were exceptions to the rule.

Measuring
The good ol’ ROI dilemma. Also here people were wary about how to measure Social Media. Do we have to measure it anyway? As a ‘best practice example’ the introduction of the phone after the Second World War was given. The US government had the ambition to put a phone on every desk in the country (that vision was later borrowed by Bill Gates and the ‘phone’ was replaced by ‘computer’). “Ridiculous”, people said. “Before you know it everybody is going to call everybody all day long.” Well, the phone came and the world didn’t collapse, nor did we morphed into a brainless communication creature (come to think of it, some of us did). Can you imagine doing your work without a phone? And did you ever see the ROI calculation of the phone? It reminds me about the same discussion I had on e-mail, internet and mobile phones. All difficult at the start but were eventually adopted without ROI calculation and changed the way we work. IBM had a nice suggestion to measure effectiveness of E2.0: Return on Contribution: how much views did a specific type of contet had. Anyway, we didn’t quite finish the discussion on ROI, and I have a feeling that this subject will emerge frequently on various congresses.

Acceptation by end users
E2.0 is all about sharing knowledge. As much as possible. But wait a second… What about the well-known and often abused ‘knowledge is power’ mantra? “Social Media causes the first real generation gap since Rock ‘n Roll”, I read in a tweet. “back then the older generation didn’t understand the fun of dancing with your hips. And now the older generation doesn’t understand the importance of sharing knowledge”. Whether it is this strong or not, fact is that a separation on the working floor seems inevitable. Time to focus on implementation.

Robbie and Madonna

A whole shopping list of challenges. Pessimistic readers might conclude after reading this blogpost so far that a marriage between Robbie Williams and Madonna is more likely than letting E2.0 succeed. Don’t worry, fortunately a lot has been said about acceptation and implementation as well.

A well-known condition of a successful implementation is linking the tool to a real business problem (as opposed to first develop the tool and find a business problem to use the tool later). A bit obvious but still very true. Next to that, find your evangelists and experts. People who get excited about these tools and developments. Give them a specific task when implementing. Another major motivator to consider is recognition. We human beings seems to be a but basic as far as status is concerned. Social Media can utilize this by implementing Reputation Management, for example.

Lee Bryant of Headshift provided in his presentation entitled ‘Transition Strategies for E2.0 Adoption’ an obvious though unique tip: “Don’t mention the S-word”. In other words, don’t throw difficult Social Media words like blogs and wikis to your people, but link them to existing tools. RSS technology? Just call it ‘e-mail which you don’t need to throw away’. Or how about Crowdsourcing: ‘your customers want to talk to you. And a wiki is ‘the intranet with big fat edit buttons all over the place’. Awesome!

The best tips however came from Gentry Underwood. Head of Knowledge at IDEO. Just his title alone must indicate that they take E2.0 pretty serious at IDEO. IDEO is a design agency. Design in the most broadest sense given the fact how his presentation was layed-out. In an all-inspiring session Gentry told the audience how IDEO has created their social platform themselves, based on existing technologies and tailor-made programming. Their platform ‘The Tube‘ was without doubt the most lickable, clickable and workable system that I’ve seen till now. All internal, so unfortunately not accessible to third parties. Also not for sale, regretfully for some interested people like myself. What Gentry did want to share was his vison on the acceptation by users. Outlined in 5 principles, learned by doing:

1. Build pointers to people
Put the employee centrally. Sound familiar but in reality difficult to put in practice. Everybody at IDEO gets their own blog, and on their profile page one can put personal info. The platform shows who’s available and how they perform.

2. Reward individual participation
Provide employees the personal recognition if they participate on the platform. Link this to career development and 360 degrees feedback.

3. Demand an intuitive User Interface
Employees not only ‘consume’ the information of the platform, they are also contributors. And if you can’t find your way around or need 200 page manuals it’s likely users are not going to share anything. Make sure the platform is easy to understand and minimum training is necessary.

4. Take the road more travelled
Integrate new procudures into the daily routine of people. For example, summarize the platform activities in a weekly e-mail, or place a flatscreen at the watercooler to showcase platform activities.

5. Iterate early and often
Life wasn’t perfect from the start, so don’t expect your platform to be. Start with what you have and implement small changes fast. Rather 15 small updates in one year than 1 major update each two years.

Especially this final point is considered Microsoft’s SharePoint Achilles heel. Looking at the Twitter feed I did notice some severe critical claims towards the patform. Guess it doesn’t really matter whether you are a diamond sponsor or not in the authentic and transparent E2.0 world. Especially the slow update pace (every three years one major update) and the ‘they don’t get it’ feeling was overall present. Nonetheless it remains the biggest platform on which intranets run and thus the biggest potential for breaking into corporations with E2.0. If they do it right.

Besides Microsoft there were plenty other vendors of E2.0 software. It’s still a very young field so vendors come and go. It still is unclear which vendor provides a solution for which business problem. But that’s charming in it’s own way too. Like in the old days of computer technology: so now they have this device, but for what are we gonna use it for?
I myself am involved in the implementation of an internal community based on innovation. From the collection and selection of ideas till the process of starting a project once ideas have been selected. But this platform needs to host our weekly podcast too, our blog and, while we’re at it, why not our wiki and RSS reader? We haven’t been able to find a solution which suited our needs for 100%, so we had to (re)design certain elements ourselves. But the solution we’re using now (www.spigit.com) is flexible enough to facilitate our requirements.

Awareness

The E2.0 congress lasted for almost 4 days. Next to several very interesting sessions during the day also the evenings were accounted for. We could choose between various sponsored cocktail parties and tweetups. We came home with the belief that the E2.0 trend might be even bigger than Web 2.0 trend. Think of it: internal communication remains important, and sharing knowledge may become even more important. Companies knowing how to facilitate in these processes might find themself some interesting competitive advantages. But be cautious about the pitfalls, too. Many employees are critical towards new ways of working. Whether true or not, be careful with implementing too much, too fast and too technical. It all starts with the awareness that things need to change, and that things can change. Eventually people will accept that things will change.

We see around us that Enterprise 2.0 is still in it’s infancy. To create awareness we have the idea to organize a Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp, somewhere in the Netherlands. Kind of ‘Enterprise 2.0 for dummies’. We don’t know yet the details but we want to keep it simple, straightforward and practical. Should you be intested, just drop me a line at erik at digiredo dot nl.

No stealing the Cloud

Thursday morning, 6:30 am. My wife runs into our bedroom asking why all our laptops are gone. And why there are so many papers spread out in the garden. In a split second you realize that the one thing always happening to other people just happened to us: they broke into our house…

Using the ‘Eastern European method’ (according to the police) they entered the house through a small window at the front of our house. As like in a candy store these socially retarded people which one might call thieves or burglars, took away stuff which belongs to a company owned by two hard-working, tax-paying people (that’s us). You have no idea (they sure don’t) what a feeling it is when people enter your house uninvited and take away stuff for which you worked your *ss off to get it, or spend days or months creating it. I won’t go into detail about the things they took, but rest assure that it was devastating for me and my family.

After having inventarised what they took you start wondering what data you have lost, which is usually the moment perspiration kicks in. “When did I make my last back up?”. Fortunately I had a reasonable back up strategy, but not perfect. I did lose stuff which I will never be able to get back. My daughter’s first birthday on video for example.

Our digital life is exploding. Petabytes of digital memories in the form of video, photos, blogposts are created every single day. Day in and day out. Who still has a physical photo album? And all these memories are so precious to us that it should be obvious to guard it with your life. And yet it is known that only about 25% of the people make a regular back up of their digital stuff. Seventy-five out of 100 people lose their entire digital life when their hard drive crashes! And of those 25 smart people, almost all of them make only a back-up on an external drive, sitting next to their computer. Clever when your hard drive crashes, not so clever when they break into your house, of even worse, if your house burns down. So the solution? Let’s go into the Cloud.

The cloud can’t be stolen. The cloud can’t burn down, or be damaged by water. That is, if you deal with a sound cloud company. Due to the fact that a lot of my stuff was in the cloud somewhere, I could continue working reasonably soon after my disaster. So which services do I use for what?

First the most important asset on your computer: your pictures. I back-up my pictures on an external hard drive, but for the more serious data loss I have backed up all my photos using a service called Mozy. For about $60 per year you get unlimited storage on their servers. I have now uploaded a total of 110 GB (which by the way takes forever) and it is a comfortable feeling that whatever happens, my digital life is save. In case of a disaster you can download your stuff again, or they can put it on a DVD and send it to you. For privacy matters you can encrypt your data which you upload so nobody can sneak around.

For e-mail I use MobileMe (private mail) and webmail (business mail). Both accounts are forwarded to a GMail account which I use on a daily basis for mail management (apart from the client on my MacBook). With one push of a button I could retrieve most of my mails.

My bookmarks and addresses, also pretty important, are synced with several Macs using MobileMe. Some people ask me what the benefit of MobileMe is. Well, only the fact that within 5 minutes I could retrieve all my addresses, phone numbers and bookmarks is definitely worth the $99 per year.

White papers, interesting presentations I find online and all other stuff which makes me a true ‘knowledge worker’ was put into Evernote. With this truly awesome program you can manage all your digital knowledge assets. They also have an iPhone application meaning that you can gather ideas on the road and that access to your digital knowledge is just one touch away. Fortunately for me Evernote puts my data also in the cloud (hence the iPhone app wouldn’t work). I just had to install the client on my new MacBook and 10 minutes later it had downloaded all my stuff and put it in Evernote.

All my documents which I have created throughout the years are stored on my iDisk (through MobileMe). Each day a backup program backs up these important files. I just had to download the last version and I was good to go.

For our project management and financial stuff (invoicing, estimates) we use CashBoard. This service is only available online, handy if you want to work with several people on a project. There was no glitch whatsoever in our billing. Pretty important I would say.

Wasn’t there anything I lost? Sure there was. For example, I lost all my passwords which I kept in my computer using a program called 1Password. Also all my to do items and my ‘Getting Things Done’ lists are gone. The application I use for this, Things, doesn’t have an online version. And because these nifty programs put their database somewhere hidden in your hard drive folder structure I forgot to back them up.

So what’s the total annual price to maintain your sanity after theft:

Mozy: $60
MobileMe: $99
GMail: Free
Evernote: Free
CashBoard: $75

Total: $234

Still anything to learn here? Sure there is. Firstly I will scrutenize my entire backup management once again. There is some stuff which you just can not put in the cloud. The original video files of our projects for example. Using HD a project can easily be around 50 to 80 GB. Uploading this to Mozy will take weeks, if not longer. We will purchase a Drobo which we will use to back up these files. Rest assure that the Drobo will be anchored and secured with a bog strong cable in the wall.

Secondly I will get me a Time Capsule. Next time this happens I just want to plug the Time Capsule in my new MacBook and continue working where I left off one hour ago.

And I will get new locks, an alarm system and a Terminator-like Security Guard…

Third part of my presentation

Finally got some time to edit the final part of my presentation at the Digital Pharma congress in Barcelona: “Best Practices Using Internal Social Media”. Check it out here:

 

First two videos of my presentation at Digital Pharma

Found myself some time to make my ‘SteveNote’ way of my presentation given at Digital Pharma in Barcelona last month. For a detailed report on the event, see here.

I have split my presentation (Best Practices for the Use of Web 2.0 and Social Media Tools for Internal Collaboration) in three parts:

Part 1: The Need for Innovation in Pharma
Part 2: Social Media and Internal Collaboration
Part 3: Best Practices Using Web 2.0 and Internal Collaboration

In this blogpost the first two episodes (it was late, so the third one coming up asap).

The Force is strong in this one: CloudForce London 2009

In a previous post I have introduced Cloud Computing as one of the ‘Next Big Things’ in the internet world. Without realizing it I have been using the Cloud for several years (GMail, WordPress) but now it seems to really take off. Some people say Cloud Computing is just a new hype, a new marketing term for something already existing for a long term. Or that Cloud Computing will eventually die due to all security issues. And let’s face it, the recent outage of Google’s services which prohibited GMail users access their mail for a few hours doesn’t help. Thought that may be so, it still remains a fact that more and more people are using these applications online and that even Microsoft is developing a cloud OS.

If one company has put the term ‘Cloud Computing’ on the map, it certainly is Salesforce.com. My first encounter with Salesforce was years ago on a congress, albeit I didn’t pay a lot of attention at that time. More recently, with the development of our innovation platform, Salesforce appeared on the radar again. We have recently done a QuickStart with them which is based on their Ideas platform. But more about that in a later post. Now I want to tell you how Salesforce puts their message in the market and claims ownership of the cloud.

Claiming the Clouds
Since we are a customer of Salesforce we got an invitation to participate in the CloudForce. The CloudForce is a gathering of (potential) Salesforce customers, this time in the ExCel centre in London. It basically is a roadshow based on their DreamForce event in the US, a three day congress on all things cloud. The main purpose no doubt is to inform customers about new developments on their platform and to give their third party developers an opportunity to showcase their apps. But overall I also think it is to impress. To claim their space in the cloud. And impress they certainly did. In a distinctive US marketing way they completely covered the ExCel Centre into blue and white, with catchy slogans and Web 2.0-ish logos. They even had walking ‘No Software’ logos greeting you at the entrance. Micky Mouse would be jealous. 

Clouds all over the place

MarcNote
The morning session was reserved for a keynote by Salesforce’s co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff. Clearly inspired by Apple’s Keynote and Steve Jobs’ performance -big hall, thousands of people, black curtains, bright logos, large screen and inspiring music (OK, turtleneck, jeans and sneakers were missing), Benioff gave a passionate presentation about his platform. This was a brand new presentation and since he wanted feedback he exceptionally allowed people to have a handout. He focussed on three main subjects: the Sales Cloud, the Service Cloud and Your Cloud. These three Clouds are then combined in the ‘Real-Time Cloud’, i.e. all is happening right away, information at your fingertips.

Marc's SteveNote

The Sales Cloud basically is the tradional sales module. Managing accounts and contacts, sales reporting, automation of lead capture and close opportunities, forecasting, etcetera. They must have thought that while copying Apple for the look and feel of the keynote, they might as well inspire themselves by other Apple goodies. And so the Genius was born. I didn’t really get the idea but to my understanding you can find similar content with one push of a button. Where have I seen that before?

The next member of the family of clouds is the Service Cloud and consists of several services, such as Call Centre, E-mail to Case, Chat, Customer Portal, Ideas, Partners, Google and Social. Social is quite interesting and can no doubt be considered a new and innovative way of using the cloud for Customer Service purposes. So what is it? In Salesforce’s opinion, the way companies have set up their Customer Services really is a thing of the past. Customers don’t call the company when the encounter a problem with one of their products. Instead, they place a comment on Facebook, tweet in Twitter or post on a forum. In other words, social all over the place. And the chance that the problem is solved in no time by fellow bloggers, Facebookers of Tweeters is pretty obvious. Traditionally companies can not tap into that ’social knowledge’. Not so when they use the Service Cloud. Using an interface between the Salesforce platform and social netwoks such as Facebook and Twitter companies can interact with the questions and directly transfer the question and answer to their own database, to be used for future queries. Clever solution which will no doubt appeal to many companies.

Your Cloud is then the assimilation of cloud services from the previously described clouds, using the elements you want.

Full house

 

No Idea?
Unfortunately little was mentioned about Ideas, the module we’re using. It seems that everytime the word ‘Ideas’ is used ‘Starbucks‘ and ‘Dell‘ coincide within the same sentence. No doubt considered A-customers. I do have the feeling that this module doesn’t get the attention it deserves. At least not on this convention, and if you look at Ideas itself you might find yourself drawing the same conclusion. 

The second part of the day was reserved for breakout sessions. In 5 tracks participants could join the discussion about a certain topic: Using the cloud the grow sales (always works for executives), Using the cloud to improve service and lower costs, Cloud computing for IT pros, Developing applications in the cloud and Simple Steps to CRM success. I did participate in the Service cloud session but did not find it an added value compared to what I had already seen, apart from the fact that you were able to ask questions. The last session I went to dealt with VisualForce, the visualization module making your Salesforce sites ‘look nice’ by changing just about anything. Lines of codes where popping up and off the screen, so way to cloudy for me.

 

No bitterballen for us
The show ended at 5pm but we were gone to our next meeting at 4pm. Later we learned that the Dutch country organization of Salesforce had invited the Dutch participants for bitterballen and beer. But when sending out this invitation only one day prior to the event one might expect some clash in agendas. It was certainly worthwile to visit CloudForce, if it was only to see the dedication Salesforce puts into this fast growing segment. Don’t know if I will be visiting again though. Depends a bit on the decision whether we contineu with Salesforce or not. But even in that case it could be interesting to follow this company. They certainly seem to have a vision on the next iteration of business software. And they’re not afraid to shout it out loud.

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