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| | SharePoint 2010 - Joining the dots | I’ve had one client come away from a Microsoft event confused by hearing about over 8 different versions of SharePoint. Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST for more advanced enterprise search capabilities is being listed as part of the SharePoint range. And then there are products such as SharePoint Designer. Further adding to the confusion, there are two different types of licence available for each edition of SharePoint Server.
To keep it simple, think of SharePoint as serving three core scenarios:
1. Storing content and basic collaborative work: Use SharePoint Foundation Services
2. Finding and managing unstructured information (documents and web content), building social networks (personalisation and knowledge sharing): Use SharePoint Server Standard Edition
3. Integrating structured information (applications, data analysis, identity management/single sign-on): Use SharePoint Server Enterprise Edition
If you want advanced search capabilities, add FAST to any one of those three scenarios. If you want offline collaborative working, add SharePoint Workspace or Outlook (2007/2010). If you want to customise how SharePoint works, you’ll be using SharePoint Designer.
From a licensing perspective, SharePoint Foundation Service is included with Windows Server 2008. For SharePoint Server, both Standard and Enterprise, there is a choice between Intranet licensing (for internal use only) and Internet/Extranet licensing (for external use/public web sites). All the extras (FAST, Office etc.) have their own separate licenses. | | Top 10 new features in SharePoint 2010 |
10. New SharePoint editions—In an effort to better unify the SharePoint stack, Microsoft will make some big changes to the SharePoint editions with the 2010 release. Windows SharePoint Server (WSS) is gone, and so is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). The free WSS has been replaced by the new SharePoint Foundation 2010. MOSS is replaced by SharePoint Server 2010, which will be available in either the Standard or Enterprise edition as well as in editions for strictly internal sites and for Internet or extranet sites.
9. New hardware requirements—Like the majority of new Microsoft servers, SharePoint 2010 will ship only as a 64-bit product. If you're deploying SharePoint on new hardware, this situation shouldn't be a problem, but it's definitely a consideration if you're planning to upgrade an existing SharePoint server.
8. New software requirements—In addition to new hardware requirements, SharePoint 2010 will require an x64 edition of either Windows Server 2008 or Server 2008 R2. It also requires a 64-bit version of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2005.
7. SharePoint Best Practices Analyzer—With the SharePoint 2010 release, SharePoint Best Practices Analyzer will be incorporated as part of the base SharePoint product. This tool provides Microsoft's guidance for SharePoint implementation and troubleshooting. A Problems and Solutions page in the analyzer helps you solve common implementation problems.
6. FAST Search—The new SharePoint release will incorporate the FAST Search technology that Microsoft acquired from the Norway-based Fast Search & Transfer company. The FAST technology provides a superset of the original SharePoint search capabilities. As its name implies, FAST Search is designed for high-end scalability. It supports a number of enhanced capabilities, including a content-processing pipeline, metadata extraction, visual search, and advanced linguistics.
5. Usage reporting and logging—SharePoint 2010 includes a new database designed to support usage reporting and logging. The usage database is extensible, allowing third-party vendors to create custom reports based on the information it contains.
4. Visio Services—Visio Services in SharePoint 2010 lets users share and collaborate on Visio diagrams. A built-in viewer lets SharePoint users view Visio files in their browser without having Visio installed on their system. Visio Services also retrieves and renders any external data used in the Visio diagrams.
3. Enhanced collaboration features—SharePoint 2010 supports tagging content as well as providing enhanced blog authoring capabilities. There's a new group authentication feature that's based on distribution list or organization and a new rich text editor for creating wikis. In addition, calendars from Microsoft Exchange Server can be merged with SharePoint calendars.
2. New browser support—SharePoint 2010 supports an extended set of browsers such as Internet Explorer (IE) 8.0 and IE 7.0, Firefox, and Safari. Notably, IE 6.0 isn't supported. So far, there's been no official mention of Google Chrome or Opera.
1. Enhanced SharePoint Designer—Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 sports a new UI, improved workflow, and improved integration between designers. Microsoft has been steadily putting the ribbon UI in many of its products, including SharePoint 2010. The new designer also has a tabbed interface and provides breadcrumb navigation. | | Connections in Australia | The Brsibane office have closed the first Lotus Connections deal in country - a rather high profile referral from IBM with Sametime integration. The project is also the first SaaS sale following the agreement we've signed to resell IBM Lotus licensing on a per user / per month basis.
Liquid Licensing as IBM Australia have named it, will be a Software as a Service offering delivering IBM Lotus software on-demand. Applicable can now offer a cost effective alternative to the traditional IBM software delivery model to one that offers both on-premise and cloud computing in a SaaS model for all IBM Lotus technologies.
IBM Lotus Domino, Sametime, Connections and Quickr can now be sold on a simple per user/per month basis. The most defining characteristics of Liquid Licensing is that IBM Lotus licenses are provided as a monthly subscription-based model rather than the single up-front annual license fee sold for perpetual. Billing is monthly, based upon user volumes with no fixed term. Simply dial up the user count or dial down on a month by month basis.
Paul Mason | | Applicable Launch Business Value Planning Services |
Business Value Planning Services (BVPS) are designed to help customer Business Decision Makers develop a plan to leverage the strategic value by improving business process, working with the customer to document, analyse, optimise, justify, sequence, and propose a plan to improve their business.
Description
BVPS is an Applicable led engagement to develop Current State process documentation and analysis, Future State process documentation and analysis, Future State KPI Improvement Analysis, and Adoption “Roadblock” and Mitigation Analysis, Future State Process Financial Benefits and Costs Analysis, and Future State Process Improvements.
Activities
> Develop Current State Process Documentation with the customer
> Develop Current State Process Analysis and Problem Identification
> Develop Future State Process - identify Process Improvements and Process Benefits with the customer.
> Develop Future State KPI Improvement
> Develop Adoption “Roadblock” and Mitigation Analysis
> Develop Future State Process Financial Benefits and Costs
> Develop Future State Process Improvement and Implementation Plan
Deliverables
BVPS Engagement Summary provides a summary of the information uncovered during the engagement based on the required activities. It includes customer specifics, documents the main business process challenges and identifies the recommended process improvements for the customer to take at the end of the engagement. Our customers can use this document to engage internal stakeholders, partners and vendors to discuss the identified process improvements and proposal generation.
Contact the Sales team on 0800 073 0312 or email sales@applicable.com | | Successful Performance in Q1 Continues in Q2. | Applicable started the year on a positive note with Q1 revenues increasing by 41% year on year. Q2 performance has seen a continued and significant growth from the strong performance in Q1 driven, in part, by major customer upgrade projects plus the acquisition of a number of mid-market and Enterprise accounts in the UK and Australia.
Headline performance statistics for H1 include:
Revenue from Professional Service projects in H1 has increased 37%* on the same period last F/Y.
Revenue from Applicable’s licensing division has increased by 42%* year on year.
Whilst Applicable's core service offerings around messaging and advanced collaboration (Web 2.0) have performed beyond expectations, this quarter has seen significant increases in Applicable’s Development Services driven by increased opportunities within the market for SharePoint and Lotus XPages development and project management.
The successful H1 figures are also a result of Applicable’s continued review of a changing market place with renewed focus on Business Process improvements, reducing Enterprise costs and improving workforce effectiveness.
*subject to audit
| | Lotus Notes Traveler in Domino 8.5.1 |
I’ve had a few queries from customers about Lotus Notes Traveler in Domino 8.5.1. in recent weeks.
The IBM Business Unit within the Applicable sales team uses a mixture of BlackBerry’s (me) and iPhones. For the latter, the newest version of Lotus Notes and Domino is a push email offering providing quick access to email (including attachments), calendar, address book, journal and to-do list for Lotus Notes mobile users.
IBM have announced a major extension of Lotus Notes and Domino collaboration software for the full spectrum of proliferating mobile and Web-connected devices such as the Apple iPhone, Nokia smartphones, thin clients, laptops and desktops used to access corporate applications and business processes.
Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 includes a few other incremental updates to functionality but the main new feature is the addition of Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol in Lotus Notes Traveler, the software that supports replication of Notes e-mail, calendars and contacts to smartphones.
Lotus Domino 8.5.1 is the first version to natively support the iPhone via Lotus Notes Traveler software. This extends Lotus Domino automatic synching for e-mail, contacts and calendar data to the iPhone, helping address the growing user demand to access Notes and Domino collaboration software on the road. The new features, which include push e-mail, contacts, and calendar, enable iPhone users to work off-line, while allowing confidential data to be erased remotely if an iPhone is lost or stolen. iPhone users can also take advantage of a corporate directory look-up feature which helps them find contact information behind their company firewall.
Updates for the Nokia Symbian platform include remote wipe, device lock, password management and external calendar integration. The IBM software provides all of these capabilities for Windows Mobile devices as well. With the iPhone, Nokia Symbian and Windows Mobile devices, and support for Research In Motion (RIM) BlackBerry, Lotus Notes and Domino now supports the vast majority of smartphones in the world.
Applicable offers deployment planning, implementation, hosting and in life support for Lotus Notes. For more information on other new Lotus features, email sales@applicabe.com
Paul | | What Is Social Computing? |
One phase I hear a lot of at Applicable is "email is where information goes to die"
The Applicable vision for social computing is to enable the full range of spontaneous, collaborative conversations around ideas, data, documents, and projects, while maintaining the necessary framework of business management and IT governance.
This vision is based on four pillars:
Context and consistency for informati n workers;
Governance and visibility for the business;
Manageability and integration for IT;
Extensibility and scalability for the future.
Social computing is a term with many meanings. We refer to social computing as the natural evolution of collaboration: a shift from a focus on content to a focus on people. The power of social computing lies with the users and the communities. Organisations obtain business value from the experiences and ideas produced through the use of these collaboration technologies that are modeled after natural social behavior. The common term for such technologies on the Internet is Web 2.0, and, in the enterprise setting, Enterprise 2.0.
Social computing capabilities are critical in the new world of business and the global knowledge economy. Social networks are conduits for people to contribute the personal knowledge and talent that can differentiate firms from their competitors and marshal the resilience to adapt to unexpected events. As businesses become more complex, distributed, and dependent on input from customers, partners, and governments, social computing technology can facilitate conversations across time and distance, while preserving the authenticity of the individual voice and the spontaneity of unstructured communication. This builds the social capital that all businesses need to operate effectively.
In addition to these generalised benefits, social computing supports strategic business goals and scenarios including:
• Providing natural ways to capture and share tacit knowledge—critical to the continuity and competitiveness of businesses faced with the retirement of baby boomers during the next 10–15 years and the virtualisation of organisations through outsourcing and telework.
• Enabling people to find and engage experts inside and outside the organisation, to generate ideas and facilitate the conversations that lead to rapid innovation.
• Helping organisations attract and retain young talent, by providing people with a familiar infrastructure of collaborative and social media to effectively blend work and life priorities and be productive.
• Increasing organisational productivity, providing managers with clear vision into team dynamics and giving knowledge workers easy, natural ways to share insights and collaborate.
If you'd like to see either Lotus Connections or Microosft Sharepoint in action, just email sales@applicable.com
Paul Mason | | Driving Business Process Improvement with Software You Already Own |
I would suggest that many companies I come across struggle to realise the full value of their existing software investments. Whether due to unclear business requirements, lack of user awareness, organisational resistance (the biggest headache for all CIO’s in my view) to change, or not leveraging existing software to address new business requirements, a significant amount of software functionality goes unused.
To tackle this problem Applicable provide Business Process Improvement (BPI) planning engagement to unlock your software’s full potential. Our BPI engagements provide a structured framework to analyse and address business problems you face every day, driving cost savings and additional value from software you already own.
What do Applicable consider the four common reasons companies underutilise their software investments?
Unclear Business Requirements
Companies frequently purchase a software solution that one department thinks is a great idea without considering how it will work within the requirements of the business. If the software is deployed without taking addressing the underlying business requirements, much of the solution’s functionality and its intended benefits will go unused.
Lack of User Awareness
As software capabilities continue to grow and expand, many end-users have difficulty keeping pace. In many instances solutions for common problems can be found within the software they were already using.
Organisational Resistance to Change
Simply put, people tend to “like things the way they are” and need to clearly understand the tangible benefits of a proposed solution prior to changing the way they do business. Without a compelling case for change, employees tend to resist using a new software solution.
Solution Duplication
When a new business requirement arises the first impulse might be to seek out and purchase new technology to address that requirement. It’s wiser to identify unleveraged capacity in your existing software and seeing if there are ways to apply this capacity to address the new business requirements.
The Solution: Business Process Improvement (BPI)
How can a company effectively address these challenges and unlock the unused value of existing software? Consider a small-scale Business Process Improvement planning engagement to address these underlying business process problems. Applicable’s BPI engagements provide a repeatable structure and framework to analyse business processes, document problems, and design usable solutions to improve your business.
A BPI engagement takes days or weeks, rather than months, and can deliver immediate and visible results because it is focused on improving a specific business process using software you already own.
How to Get Started
Business Process Improvement planning engagements should be short, targeted, and inexpensive. Here are a few key questions and answers that can help get you started on your own BPI engagement:
Why Applicable? BPI workshops can be executed using internal resources or with external help but Applicable have developed a business process for analysis offerings that can easily fit into the BPI methodology. For example, if you are a Microsoft customer you might be eligible for a free consulting service called Business Value Planning Services (www.microsoftbvps.com) from Applicable as a BVPS certified partner.
What business process should I target? Although any business process could be analysed through a BPI engagement, it is generally best to target smaller, departmental, discrete business processes. Great candidates got BPI are processes where you and your team are able to fully understand the problems and plan process improvements over the course of a few days, rather than larger processes that could take weeks or months to analyse.
Who from my organisation should be involved? BPI engagements are most successful when a team of 7-10 people can participate, preferably from a variety of groups impacted by the process at hand. For instance, if you were analysing an employee handbook development process, you would want representation from HR, the business departments, Legal and IT.
How can I gauge success? Take a baseline of your current process performance, both quantitative and qualitative. How long does it take? How many people are involved? What’s the error rate? How much does it cost? How much of a “headache” is the process? Then re-evaluate after the BPI engagement’s improvements are put into place.
In an increasingly challenging business climate, businesses cannot afford to let small process problems compound into large operating inefficiencies.
Paul Mason
paul.mason@applicable.com | | Whatever Your Social Networking Strategy Is. |
Applicable are committed to bringing the value of social software to the enterprise regardless of whether you have deployed and IBM, Microsoft or a best of breed strategy.
With that goal in mind, the latest version of Lotus Connections helps drive the concept of coexistence. Available now as a free download on the IBM Lotus Business Solutions Catalog are the following plug-ins for Microsoft SharePoint, Office and Windows.
The IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 Plug-in for Microsoft SharePoint is intended to enhance Microsoft SharePoint environments with additional social and collaborative functionality via interoperability with IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 services. The plug-in provides the following features:
•Lotus Connections Profiles search integrates with your Microsoft SharePoint directory, and you can easily add people to your Microsoft SharePoint group or site.
•Lotus Connections business card for getting contact and social networking information about users in your organisation appears within your Microsoft SharePoint environment. From the business card, you can easily email, instant message, open their Blog, Bookmarks or full Profile.
•Lotus Connections tag cloud Web Part can be added to any Microsoft SharePoint site for finding content contributed to the social network. Clicking a tag, launches a query against all Lotus Connections services. From the results, easily explore the social data in Lotus Connections using the tags as a gateway to the Lotus Connections federated search.
The IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 Plug-in for Microsoft Office now provides the following features:
•Add a Microsoft Office document to an Lotus Connections Activity.
•Create a To Do list for a Lotus Connections Activity.
•Post a Microsoft Word document to a Lotus Connections Blog.
•Search on a person's name to view their Lotus Connections profile or search for content in other Lotus Connections services such as Bookmarks, Communities, Blogs and Activities.
•Add Microsoft Outlook content, such as email, to a Lotus Connections Activity.
•Access Lotus Connections services such as Profiles, Bookmarks, Communities and Blogs from the Microsoft Outlook toolbar.
•View Lotus Connections business cards for people in your organisation who send you e-mail.
| | IBM Lotus Software as a Service - Heads up. |
Applicable UK and Australia are planning a joint announcement with IBM in early September to mark the launch of Applicable's Software as a Service (SaaS) platform delivering hosted services for IBM Lotus Domino, Sametime, Connections and Quickr.
The model will be based upon a per user, per month as an alternative to the traditional IBM Passport Advantage model of purchasing licensing and maintenance annually in advance.
This model will deliver a hosted, high availability service with flexible monthly billing index linked to head count that can scale up or shrink to fit.
As alternative to IBM's LotusLive offering, the service will scale to include the hosting of Lotus Notes application and coexistence with 3rd party solutions including archiving tools, SharePoint and Blackberry Enterprise Server.
The service will also provide flexibility around compliance for all aspects of data management and governance.
Paul Mason - Business Development Manager
| | The true TCO test. |
A criticism we often hear from customers, industry insiders and ‘experts’ is that the higher cost and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of Lotus Domino technology is a significant barrier to future investment (Domino 8.5, Sametime Advanced.......) and a key business driver for migration to Microsoft Exchange. This is true in certain circumstances the true cost comparisons are very rarely investigated.
Applicable believe that this stems from the fact that the industry is stuck on the perception that Microsoft Exchange licensing and support costs are the main drivers and primary measures of cost.
Applicable have set out to investigate the total cost of ownership for two messaging and advanced collaboration vendors, IBM and Microsoft. This will, hopefully, allow readers of the white papers to make a rational comparison between the two vendors based on cost for similar functionality and scale.
The scenarios chosen were designed to aid this comparison by ensuring that similar function points and user estate types were delivered by the platform designs. It is aimed at readers who wish to compare costs of the latest technology from the two leading providers.
Within the three white papers, the following scenarios have been identified.
> Email – the delivery of an email service to the user estate with 500Mb Quotas
> Email + Instant Messaging Services – the delivery of the above with simple chat and awareness services.
> Email + Basic Collaboration – the delivery of the above with team information, document sharing and simple workflow
> Email + Advanced Collaboration – the delivery of the above with additional VOIP integration, Web and Shared Conferencing, External Federation for Instant Messaging.
Contact us if you wish to receive copies of the papers
Paul Mason - Business Development Manager | | Domino.doc update | One of the less surprising announcements from the Quickr sessions is that Domino.doc will no longer be available from May this year.
Support will continue until Q1 2010. Not surprising as the tool has had little IBM investment for 5 years now.
The important news for all users from ,Lotusphere is that IBM will release a free of charge migration tool to port content into Quickr. For domino.doc customers with bespoke templates then there are some challenges when using the migration tool. The best advice is to revert back to the standard design.
For those customers with active support and maintenance, then these licenses will ensure you are automatically authorised to use Quickr.
For those customers without active support, the message was very clear. You have until May to reactivate to allow you to migrate to Quickr.
Paul Mason
Sales Manager, Applicable |
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