I left Portland late Sunday night, or was it Monday morning? Anyway it was way dark thirty. I arrived in Boston at 11:00 am. I headed over to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and sat down with CMP's Alex Dunne for this podcast interview. Excuse me if I sound rummy.

Andrew McAfee gave Enterprise 2.0 a report card at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference yesterday.

A - awareness of the concept
A- - Technologies
C - Communication of the results

And the professor has given us homework. He called on the industry to do a better job sharing best practices, applications and case studies. The Enterprise 2.0 Uncoalition might be just the forum to share the love.

In that spirit here's a start. We put this together for an enterprise customer who is using the Attensa Feed Server to improve corporate communications across their organization. I've blogged about this earlier in a series but here's the complete document.

Download Attensa's Feed Reading Best Practices

I'm in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference today. Got in Monday after taking the redeye from Portland. I sat down yesterday with Alex Dunn who is blogging and podcasting the conference for CMP. I'll post a link when the podcast is up.

Today is focused on connecting with the people who are driving the promise of connection, collaboration and change through Enterprise 2.0 technologies and tools.

It's the 40th anniversary of another big catalyst of connection, collaboration and change...the Summer of Love. In that spirit we are trying a new approach. We are quietly kicking off the Enterprise 2.0 Uncoalition today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Janet Johnson is blogging about it here.

The concept is to start a discussion and create the connections and integration points that will make Enterprise 2.0 technologies and products work together for real people. So customers can pick and choose, mix and match the best of breed products they need to solve their specific communication challenges.

Beneath the promise of Enterprise 2.0 apps things are missing.

Some of the obvious missing pieces are:

• The ability to securely and seamlessly move attachments from publishing platforms through feeds to desktop, web and mobile feed readers
• Consistent tagging across collaborative publishing and feed serving and reading platforms to make folksonomies and searching viable across tools
• Dealing with identity and security across apps - to many passwords...so little time.
• The ability to easily create custom feeds from blog and wiki apps that get the right information to the right people with no information overload or underload.

We've already started the conversation with Foldera and Jive and this is just the beginning. The are nearly 50 companies exhibiting at the conference.

This occasionally crops up in our discussions with companies investigating Enterprise 2.0 technologies. In some corporations BLOG is four letter word conjuring up images of sociopathic rantings, and way too much time being devoted to cat pictures and reviews of LOST.

If you ask me, this paranoia boils down to fear of the unknown or maybe it's about lack or respect and lack of trust in employees to do the right things with the tools they have to work with. When you think about it, if you were inclined, you could do more damage to a company's reputation and morale with email and confidential attachments sent to the wrong people than you can with a secure internal blog post.

I'm not sure what drives this perception about blogs and I'm not the only one who has experienced this fear from corporate management. Six Apart's Anil Dash makes getting beyond fear of blogs a key message in his evangelism. The Burton Group's Mike Gotta has seen it and heard it too.  His take away is that companies need examples of how blogs can be used effectively to solve business and communication challenges.

I'm republishing the highlights from his post "Getting Over Fear of Blogs and including the list of blogging applications that make sense for business environments.

You can read Mike's complete post on Collaborative Thinking.

Mike takes it from here:

Regarding Web 2.0 and social software, I find that people are often captivated by the use of these concepts and tools in the consumer market. While some technologists are skeptical, there are also a growing number of people that are wondering how such practices and technologies could be applied internally and whether such use could bring about some degree of business transformation – especially in terms of leveraging worker know-how and collective insight.

The tone and emotion levels however get quite passionate however, when the topic of blogs comes up. There does seem to be agreement that public-facing blogs can have real business value from the perspective of marketing, PR, customer intimacy and community-outreach. That perspective however does not seem to transfer broadly when the conversation shifts to possible internal adoption of blogs. In fact, it is not uncommon to hear a range of opinions that could be represented by the following statements:

• Risk-related: “We’re afraid of what people will say.”
• Productivity-related: “We don’t want people wasting their time.”

Performance-related: “We don’t see the business value.”

The conversation often swings back to the Internet and how blogs are used as a public soapbox to express personal opinions and how bloggers add fuel to emotionally-charged debates on topics many organizations view as a workplace distraction (e.g., politics, sports, entertainment, religion, breaking news, etc.). A good number of people I’ve talked to feel that blogs introduce risk (e.g., hostile workplace), negatively impacts productivity and hinders overall performance of business processes.

I think part of the problem is due to a lack of examples of how blogs can be applied to solve the types of business challenges organizations face on a daily basis.

Internal Communication

There are many situations where organizations need to broadcast information to its workforce without the need for that information to be pushed to its workers in an intrusive manner (e.g., e-mail).

• A Human Resources department can leverage blog technology to continually keep employees updates on various benefit plans, awareness of enrollment dates, etc.
• CXO-level management can leverage blogs to informally communicate company issues related to markets, economics and its competition.
• Organizations can use blogs to communicate information to employees on the various community-outreach and social programs in need of volunteers.

Program / Project Management

Program management offices (PMO) and project management teams often establish operating environments where information may not always be captured and disseminated in a timely manner. The structure of these organizing bodies may challenge its ability to quickly respond, making it difficult to communicate credible and relevant information.

• A PMO blog could provide a journal of activities, issues and future actions that could be valuable not only to workers within the PMO but to those monitoring and tracking the PMO elsewhere in the organization
• A group blog for developers and quality assurance teams could act as a clearinghouse to voice design concerns, for developers to record and report findings or to capture/disseminate software build and fix notifications discovered during development or testing cycles (e.g., shift notes)
• PMO and project teams create a variety of guidelines, procedures and other types of documentation. While wikis are good vehicles for the collaborative work on the content itself, blogs can provide a platform for individuals to provide deeper personal commentary.

Community-building

Organizations have struggled to find common off-the-shelf tools that allow for the capture, dissemination and augmentation of information while also enabling broad participation and community interaction. Facilitating open communication is a key aspect for organizations interested in sharing know-how and creating effective community-building environments (e.g., knowledge management).

• Research organizations have long valued the importance of personal journals and lab notebooks to catalog observations and record insight. Blogs within such an environment not only are of benefit to those within such communities but enable others to “look over the shoulders” of those engaged in such activities.
• Government organizations can use blog systems to enable first responders to share insight and lessons-learned from on-the-job experiences
• Specialists in many different professions (e.g., utilization management nurses, fraud investigators, security experts, underwriters, engineers) can use blogs to more easily communicate methods and practices relevant to their work activities

Business process

A multitude of business activities include capture of unstructured information as part of processing a particular task. Many applications do not naturally handle the type of free-form commentary and annotation users would like to add to a transaction or append to a case file. There are other situations where applications need to deal with conversational information that are not well-supported by traditional application models (e.g., issue tracking, exception handling, problem resolution).

• A competitive intelligence process is often dependent on capturing field observations, rumors and collating information detected from various news sources. Blog systems can provide the platform the collecting and vetting this type of market monitoring, analysis, and opportunity/threat assessment.
• Certain support processes require workers to capture notes as part of their remote activity (e.g., field repair). Offline authoring tools (e.g., Microsoft Windows Live Writer) could be used to compose analysis on a worker’s laptop and then upload to a group blog when network connectivity is available. In other situations, certain work activities might include capture of notes into operational logs. Blog technology can enable capture of task-related notes inline with performance of that operational process.

OK, I'm back.

We use the same tools and techniques internally.

• Our CEO as a blog to share the big picture with Attensa employees
• Our marketing and development teams use secure blogs to keep each group informed on project status, customer wins and the buzz surrounding Attensa
• Our sales and marketing people share competitive insights on a secure blog.
• We've set up a secure blog with our PR and SEO teams to share strategies, metrics and status reports.

Analytics on the Attensa Feed Server gives insight into how this information flows through the organization and helps assess and identify the most effective channels for communicating specific information

Attensa tools make publishing to these internal blogs incredibly easy. I used one of the republishing tools in Attensa for Outlook to share Mike's post this morning. I scanned the headlines from his blog in the River of News. The title "Getting Over Fear of blogs" caught my eye. I hit the Attensa publish icon which launched Windows Live Writer and pre-populates a new  blog post with the all of the copy, links and images - all nicely formatted. I just select the blog I want to publish to from a list. I can easily edit and add context, categories, tags and then republish the post with a click. These tools make it incredibly easy to share these thoughts with everyone subscribing to the blog. 

Configuring Attensa 2.1 to publish using Windows Live Writer is easy, so you can republish to your blog with one click. While still in beta, Live Writer is a flexible and powerful tool for publishing and, so far, has performed well in my tests.

P.S. My boss made me write this, and I also wrote a short and sweet How To on using Attensa with Windows Live Writer to publish to your blog.

 Rod does it again. Here's a solid introduction on putting internal blogs to work.. With our RSS reader integration with Outlook and our development work on Notes and Sametime, why not have the feeds come to you instead of using a web based reader?

"Are you a CEO? Do you want you people to across silos? Do you want your engineers or your designers to know exactly what the sales people are asking them? Or better yet, do you want everyone in your company to have a deep understand of what your clients actually want, need and will pay money for?

Do you want your people to be personally motivated?

Has anything in your company taken off half as aggressively as blogs and social media have taken off in the open Internet?

Now I have a simple question for you. Do you know how to use blogs within your organization to help you get work done? There are plenty of blogs out there that can tell you how to use blogs as a PR and marketing tool to communicate with your clients. But, when people actually think about getting work done within the organization, not a lot has been written.

This post aims to tell you exactly what you need to do to use blogs efficiently within your organization.

Activity Centric Worksites

First, you do not need to buy a multi-million dollar system to get the benefits of Activity Centric Worksites. You can use a regular blogging platform, such as WordPress or MovableType. You will need to hire some consultants to make those consumer systems do the job for you. Total set up cost, in my experience, is $50K to $100K. Or you can spend about the same amount with a pre-built enterprise class system from companies like iUpload, Blogtronix or Traction Software.

The idea behind Activity Centric Worksites is to use blogging tools to facilitate focused business communication. Instead of using a blog as a tool for one person to broadcast their thoughts on “whatever”, use blogs as a platform to help people within your company communicate about what they are doing for work. To make it easy to frame the conversation, provide structure around simple concepts that make sense for your company.

If you are running a consulting company, you might have following Worksite types:
• Project Worksites - these are used to exchange information about a specific project
• Client Worksites - these are used to talk about a specific client
• People Worksites - these are like internal resumes that show who is working on what
• Practice Worksites - these are used to communicate amongst a whole team
• Focus Worksites - the only thing that resembles a consumer blog, these are written by a small group and are like internal e-journals dedicated to specific technical topics

Finding the Right Set of Worksite templates

Depending on what your company does, you are going to need a different list of Worksite templates. Ask yourself what do we talk about here? If you are a software company, you might have whole worksites dedicated to specific modules in the new release of your product. Instead of Practice Worksites, you might have a Release Worksite that coordinates information about each module within the release.

If you are a bank, you might have Clients, Products, Market Overviews, Projects, and People.

Start with Search

Most internet experiences start with someone going to Yahoo, Google, MSN or Baidu. They are all search sites. If you want your people to be productive, your main internal home page shouldn't be some waste of time portal. It should look like Google, and it should help people find the information they need.

Your People will Need Wizards to Help Create New Worksites

A Worksite is more than just a blog theme. For example, a Project Worksite should include a list of the people working on the project with links back to each person's People Worksite. The Project Worksite should probably also include a link to the Client Worksite.

To create a copy of a blank Project Worksite, you need to create a simple wizard that walks your employees through the process of creating a new site. You also need a system that has CMS capabilities which help deal with access control, user authentication, backup, audit trails of who read what, and given admin tools to support the re purposing of posts - write once, publish in many places.

Many to Many Communication

There are very few software systems out there that can even define the notion of a Worksite type, let alone give you the frame work to automate the creation of a new one. The only systems I know of today that can do this are iUpload, Blogtronix and Traction Software.

IBM's Lotus Notes does not have "straight out of the box" support for Activity Centric Blogs - although they do have their own Activity Centric Computing notion. In Hannover, your email inbox is organized into folders that are called activities.

In mid 2006, IBM Lotus CTO Doug Wilson said

Right now, the ‘glue’ that associates tasks and objects within an activity remains in the users’ heads. But if we’re able to create and save the thread of an activity, we should also be able to preserve it as a pattern that others can reuse when performing the same or similar activities."

In Nov of 2006, Domino Blogsphere V3 said

Currently in very early development stages is a new application that doesn't have an official name yet but it is basically a Blog Manager.

I am currently unaware of any other system that can support true enterprise class blogging that could support "Worksites". Microsoft's Sharepoint does not have this functionality.

The issue is one of creating a platform that supports many to many communication, as opposed to most consumer blogging tools, which were originally designed to support one to many communication. There are tools out there that support multiple people authoring one blog, but that isn't the issue here.

For example, in a Big 4 consulting firm of 100,000, you could easily end up with a huge number of blogs:

100,000 People Worksites
400,000 Project Worksites per year
100,000 Client Worksites
5,000 Practice Worksites
5,000 Focus Worksites

Examples

Here are some screenshot examples of what these things could look like. When I created these, I simply called them "Pages" instead of "Worksites". I term "pages" is confusing, because it makes people think they are looking at one page, not a whole site about a specific work topic.

Why not use a Wiki?

Wikis are a useful tool for collaborating on a document. They become less useful when they are used to communicate about events. For example, Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia. But, when you think about daily events such as updates on the relationship with a client, or the latest events in a project, blogs already have the built in notion of time stamped posts that communicate that information.

This is not to say that a company should never use wikis. Instead, there is a time and place for both wikis and blogs within the Enterprise.

Motivation through Recognition

To get people to contribute, you have to give them a personal reason to use a new system like this. One way is to make sure that people get credit for the good work they do.

Other tips and Tricks

• Email Integration - Transition in to using the system by making sure that your Worksite system supports an email address for every blog / Worksite. That way, people can just cc the blog instead of CC'ing to CYA. This also gives people an easy way to start to use a big system.
• Dos and Don'ts - People will recognize that the new system is a powerful reputation management system. Some will be worried that it could damage their reputation as much as help them. Give them some guidance with a firm set of dos and don'ts/
• Screencasts - The success of YouTube has proven that people LOVE videos. Use videos and screencasts to teach your employees about the new system and get them excited to use it.
• Use Weekly Email Updates - Blogs do not replace email. They only simply an additional communication tool. To get people excited about a new system, and to make sure they learn how it is being used and where it is succeeding, send out weekly update emails to your user base. Some people will take a long time to switch over to the new system. Weekly emails will keep them in the loop.
• Forget Dashboard - Use an RSS Reader - If you are a senior executive responsible for a whole cascade of projects, use a tool like Netvibes to monitor each of those projects. Skim the headlines. Click on the posts that seem to need your attention.
• Enterprise Digg - Cogenz is an example of a tool that you can use to help your people let each other know about interesting ideas.
• Folksonomy - Order Emerges from Chaos. And people will standardize on what keywords and tags to use to describe their articles. While it is important to give some structure, such as defining Worksite types, it is not necessary to dictate everything.

Source: How to use Blogs in the Workplace
by Rod Boothby

Last week we released Attensa for Outlook 2.0.1.29. After using it for a week, I'm impressed with the small details. I know I work here and I'm supposed to like Attensa no matter what, but I really do love the way we're streamlining Attensa to keep up with the way I work. (My boss didn't make me write that.)

Here's what our team has put into this release:

1. More robust publishing. Attensa now sends graphics to your blog service.
2. They've cleaned up some issuse with how categories synchronize between the various Attensa parts... a big one for me is that Firefox has now forgotten my deleted categories, which used to hang around far too long.
3. The River of News view in Outlook continues to mature and integrate with our Attensa Feed Server, and now has icons to indicate whether a feed is mandatory or not.
4. The Outlook team has continues to tinker with the Pod Player, so playback has improved.

Since I remove and reinstall Attensa all the time, add and remove feeds for testing and in general do awful things to my computer in the interest of Science (like deleting data files while they're in use), I've noticed that this newest Attensa version recovers from the bad things I do, usually with just a simple restart of the Attensa Engine.

There's a lot to love about Attensa in the small details of how it works. It works the way I work.

I'll be talking about "Putting Web Feeds to Work" next Friday at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle. Summit host Steve Brobeck, along with DL Byron, co-wrote our favorite book on business blogging: Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business.

Steve has a solid track record of organizing and producing high value conferences. It all starts Wednesday, October 25 with a pre-conference workshop to help people who are new to blogging get up to speed fast. He's lined up an impressive list of experts who will cover the latest tools and techniques for blogging, videoblogging,podcasting and measuring results. Check out the session schedule. Sign up and have some cantaloupe with me next Friday morning.

We have completed the integration of MoveableType Enterprise with Attensa.com. First we built the Attensa news section of the site on MTE. And now the Attensa blog has made the move from Typepad. In the words of Tony Maxymillion our crack Web developer "with only a few glitches, everything completed in a timely and relatively heartburn free manner. Migration couldn't have gone more smoothly."

The feed is the same so current subscribers won't miss a thing.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk released an album in 1973 titled Prepare Thyself to Deal with a Miracle. It features a live 21 minute saxaphone solo. When you listen to it, it's impossible to discern when the man took a breath. Incredible.

We are in the process of transitioning sections of Attensa.com to the MoveableType platform. Yesterday our crack web team showed me MoveableType Enterprise in action working on our servers. We're starting with the news section so that loading news releases, updating our news coverage and event schedule will be as easy as posting to this Typepad blog and there will be a feed for each section. I'll be working with this miracle. Incredible.