Lite going around the Internet

The news about ProjectLounge Lite has gone around the Internet...

Italy: http://kolabora.com/

India: http://in.sys-con.com/

America: http://opensource.sys-con.com/

as well as some newswire services:

http://www.i-newswire.com/

http://www.prweb.com/

Having said that, most of the activity has been through the Ruby on Rails Wiki and we are seeing a steady sign up rate as a result.

IBM QuickPlace is making headway in Australia

ComputerWorld Australia, has repoted that the accounting and advisory firm, RSM Bird Cameron, "will deploy IBM Lotus QuickPlace solution across its offices nationally".
This is a good step forward for educating users on the benefits of collaboration and will give the firm a solid foundation in which to organize their projects.

Writeboard: Yet another word processor?

Moving from WordPerfect 5.1 to MS Word 6.0 was probably the biggest struggle for me as far as changing the way I used word processors. I tried to use the keyboard mappings to make is easier but no matter how much I tried, ctrl-shift-f7 it was just easier to learn the new way to work. After that, I tried Lotus Word Pro as it had Notes FX features that made mapping fields to a Lotus Notes database easy. However, it seems my needs for a Word processor have stagnated since. I like the spell checker, don't like the grammar suggestions, I liked the print preview but no longer print stuff out.
I ended up setting up a load of short cuts to get my styles all mapped so that I could structure the document with headings, lists, and paragraphs to make the table of contents as easy as possible.
However, when I really look into the core use for me, XHTML covers all the major parts of a document (headings, lists, paragraphs, and structure). So, to me I should probably just switch to XHTML for my documents.
This would present a number of wonderful side benefits: the ability to use any type of version control system, easy reversioning and well supported viewing.
However, I am probably a bad example of most users. I tend to be too technical and end up in code as a first solution. Whereas most users would never code their way out of a problem and tend to already have their word processors setup and working.
So, as much as I would like to change the way world does word processing, I would prefer to allow users to just to share what they have already produced. I guess according to this article, then I prefer bloat but I don't see it that way. Rather than saying the choice is between simplicity and bloat, I see the choice as between the familiar that most of my business colleges are using and a new tool they have to underscore and asterisk their way around.
I think it is too easy just to make a new tool and throw away all the users built up knowledge and tell them to use something else. However, it would be better to let them build on what they do know and just provide them a better way to overcome the short comings with as little "rip and replace" as possible.
In the programming world, we see this all the time, too many developers would prefer to write a new program than to maintain an old one that needs some fixes. Fixing the old is far less glamorous but it is this less glamorous work that the users really appreciate.
To conclude, I don't see writeboards as a big advantage to the problems with emailing around documents that you are collaborating on. I do see them as a really neat solution. The first priority would be to get the current MS Word documents out of email onto a shared collaboration space rather than emailing them around. So, I would prefer to see users share their existing documents in a better way rather than changing the tools they use to create the documents.

Instant Rails ProjectLounge Lite

The instant rails version of lite is available now via torrent. Here Mag Link, or Torrent. Otherwise, you can download it directly from this blog via this link.

ProjectLounge Lite released to open source

It has been a few months coming, but we have finally released all our code into the glory of LGPL open source. The open access SVN repository is open and available for anonymous read access. If anyone wants to contribute code, please contact me with what you want to add.
The svn URL is svn://svn.projectlounge.com/open/light and I will be updating a project home page soon.
There is also going to be a simple one click install via the Instant Rails framework.
If all this code seems a little too much, you can see a hosted version at: http://www.pllite.com/projects/new to create your own project there. The access code is currently "pl124" but this will change to a captcha eventually.
The next few weeks will see a lot more development, so please if you are interested in contributing to an open source project that helps people get out of email and collaborate online about projects, please let Ian Connor know.

Security Issues

Business users who place a high value on their information are unlikely to utilise the forums provided by such ubiquitous and public channels as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

At least not for serious collaboration required by Project Teams and geographically dispersed business units. Especially when they want to work with data that is strictly retained for their own organisation's "eyes only" while working with outside organisations with whom they want to share other information. In these circumstances, for their own personnel, it's important that all the information can be accessed from the one place with security in place to ensure that 3rd parties can only see the information they are allowed to see.

For example the Project Manager will have discussions with his own staff about the client that would not be in the best interests of the Project for the client to even be aware of. If the personnel are not able to get together face to face for such discussions, then a secure electronic resource needs to be in place to capture them - and keep them available for the team members that need to be aware of them. At the same time, the pertinent acpecst or outcomes of such discussion should be there for the client.

Such robust security is vital in business and should be managed smoothly from all users perspectives. The public domain might provide some of this, but it will be clumsy and always potentially fraught with the potential for leakage.

I liken it to having a project team meeting on client premises, with the door open, while issues are discussed that would ordinarily be kept within the project team.

Will google squish the web 2.0 startups?

Looking through a recent article, please don'’t squish the startups there seems to be some worry that google, yahoo and MSN's free service model with threaten smaller innovative online collaboration firms.
I am not sure this will be such a problem. There have been many that debate the economics of "free" but I don't see any business model that involves free services and support. That is because that is where the true value lies, in the support.
The ability to get hold or a real support person that will fix your problem and let you get back to business is the true measure of any business critical service. If you cannot get support when you need it, then you cannot rely on the service for your business.
This can be seen in a number of ways. For instance, people are not willing to tolerate endless computer driven prompts and they would prefer to talk to a real person as soon as possible (see gethuman.com). Then even when you get a person, you want to make sure you have a quality person that can help you. This can be seen in the backlash against call centers that are in different countries. I don't think this is related to any racismm but rather people with a similar culture are easier to deal with. If the person supplying the support or services understands your business culture, the whole process is far easier.
A recent example of this is that Apple has recently changed its mind about setting up a call center in India (see cnet) and it has high ratings for its support compared with others.
The bottom line for business is that quality support and services will never and can never be free or even "cheap". For a business situation, you need a level of quality and assurance that you will be supported and served. Google will never squish this need no matter how many advertising based office or collaboration applications they roll out. Business is interested in lower the costs but if there is a risk that it will result in a drop of productivity then the interest will soon disapear.
My advice to Web 2.0 firms closing their doors is focus on the support and services they provide. If you can provide high quality services, then your business will always be solid.

Collaboration companies are better companies

It is true, it has actually been studied. There was a study released today Collaboration is a key driver of business performance that clearly shows that those whom collaborate have a better business. In one sense, this might be considered a topic for master mind of the bleeding obvious - however it is really interesting that some do not consider collaboration and sharing important to their business.
To me, the origins of a "company" is a group of people collaborating around a set of objectives and thus the foundation rather than just a driver. So, without proper collaboration there would be no company or business.

So much is available for free

This month, the 5th iX conference will be held and the Jakarta Post had a write up on why they expect it to be of such interest.
It is so true that so much is available for free on open source, and we could not agree more. However, this is where I draw the distinction between the two meanings of the word "free". One is freedom or liberty and the other is without payment or consideration. In the open source world, the most important meaning is that of freedom and the liberty to take something in and to extend upon it. This ability to extend the work and contribute back is so powerful.
I would never expect services or support to ever be "free" or without payment. However, you can certainly see why code should be open and it makes sense to let others make it better.

Web 2.0 and online collaboration

I was reading through the Business Week Site today, it really does sound like people are catching on to the idea that email is second place to other collaboration technologies. They are talking, in the sense of enterprise 2.0, that we could look at what the kids are doing. They are probably not using email for everything and prefer social networking sites, chat, and blogs. If you take blogs for instance, rather than sending out an email to all your friends with photos, you could post a blog entry and those who are interested, would know already through a RSS feed reader. Now, if you turn that around to a project situation, it would say that you should not send an email to everyone in the project for every task you do, but just post it in your collaboration space and they can access the information on their terms when they are working on the project.

Most services don't allow you to backup your data

I was looking at a recent article by ABC news about online collaboration. See Buying Guide: Online Collaboration Services. It states at the bottom, "Finally, you'll have to rely on your online collaboration service for backups. None that we tested "­offer a way of backing up remote data to your local machine".
This means that they have not tested Lotus/IBM QuickPlace or any Notes/Domino based solution. This seems odd to me given that the Ziff Davis Media Inc group use Lotus Notes internally.
Anyway, because the Notes/Domino solution all use Notes "NSF" databases, they replicate really well and can be taken offline through the Domino Offline Services (DOLS) or in QuickPlace's world "work offline". This has the effect of replicating all the databases to your local machine.
ProjectLounge has customers that use this to extend the backupschedulee for critical projects. ProjectLounge offers Daily and Weekly backups but some users want more and with the ability to go offline, you can backup your own data very easily. Also, unlike many SQL or dump based backups, you can open the databases with Lotus Notes and inspect the data from the back-end and use copy/paste to put deleted documents back into service.

MSN Messenger for collaboration

I have looked over the new version of MSN messenger and it reminds me of the differences between MS Word 6.0 and 2003. There are a load of new features that I would love to play with if I had the time. However, there is no real business need that drives me towards it. I am also not a big fan of video calling and would prefer reliable Voip that you can clearly hear each word the other person is saying.
I have wanted to create a projectlounge "secretary"” or "“clerk"”. It would be some kind of automated attendant that would take messages, file attachments or record online meetings into your secure online collaboration space. That way, if you have a file you quickly want to share with the team, you can ping your secretary who would see that it is uploaded and filed for you.
This could be expanded beyond files onto other command driven tasks with some more complexity. I started coding this in skype and was able to read in text into a workplace but it would not do it very neatly and had some scalability issues. We already have skype in our open source lite project, so it was easy to play with but not ready for prime time yet.
I end up using both skype and messenger in my daily work life and flip between them without too much thought.

People need to share first

One of the biggest hurdles to online collaboration is the word “collaboration”. Some people find it hard to share and collaborate in the real world and this carries over to the online world also.
Online, one of the most primitive way to share information is via email. However, when the lines of communications grow beyond two people, the classic inefficiencies come into play.
These are well documented in the mythical man month’s group communication formula: n(n-1)/2. As you add people to your project, the lines of communication grow very quickly. In email we see this as email threads that are impossible to keep track of that go off in multi-threaded ways.
If you add attachments into the mix, this spells total disaster. Not only does some of these emails get treated as spam, but others get blocked by firewalls, size limitations and email quotas.
However, these technical obstacles can be overcome with the proper tools if the underlying collaboration mentality is present in the team.

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