Both a recent vacation and the tragic events of September 11th have prompted P.G. Daly to revisit an old, nagging question of hers. To what degree is the current state of exponential growth of technology, the infinitesimal ways of staying connected, and the intrusion of technology into every facet of our lives actually improving our lives? At what cost to our basic needs and humanity?
In part one we introduced the notion of lightweight processes for software development and began walking through the steps of an XP project, starting with User Stories documented on index cards and prioritized into a release schedule using XP's Planning Game. In part two we continue with XP's approach to coding, testing and refinement, then look at how intranet practitioners in particular can benefit from this radical new methodology.
Office XP offers a variety of compelling, time-saving reasons to upgrade, especially for teams. The slew of document management and collaboration tools that it contains promise to make your daily tasks a lot easier.
Compared to blockbusters like Internet World or JavaOne, the SD shows are intimate gatherings of mostly developers. As such, they tend to focus on education, offering high-quality classes and de-emphasizing the vendor expo that dominates many bigger events. That was the case in Boston last month, and it turned out to be just what the doctor ordered.
The recent success enjoyed by software based on the peer-to-peer architecture model has sparked off debate as to whether such a model is viable for enterprise applications. Peer to peer means "equal to equal," and it generalizes the notion of client and server - a peer can just as easily be a server as a consumer of resources. In our article we analyze this new trend that has become something of a hot topic.
The principal Enterprise Information Portal vendors fall into one of seven major categories. This wide range of players can be explained by the fact that an enterprise portal is a web application that must be capable of integrating the largest number of functionalities within a user workspace. Therefore, most software vendors figure there is a place for their solution within the EIP market. This article will help you make sense of the situation.
When Virtual Private Networks arrived on the technology scene they promised bulletproof security for corporate networks at a fraction of the leased-line cost. As time passed, the enthusiasm for VPNs waned - the encryption technology available didn't match companies' dual expectations of high-speed performance and maximum-security requirements. According to the following article, times have changed.
What are the winning characteristics of successful corporate intranets? While there are too many to mention in this column, here are five winning characteristics of leading intranets that will help drive success on your intranet.
Kevin Werbach, the editor of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 wrote an excellent issue on Knowledge Management. Further, he says he's writing about "Post Modern KM." So, we put the question to Kevin: What is postmodern knowledge management?
The choice between unmanaged chaos and over-managed process is a long-standing one in software design, newly highlighted by the need for rapid, responsive development of Web-based systems. To address this need a class of lightweight methodologies has arisen, the best known of which is Extreme Programming (XP). XP is actually two things: a value system and a set of practices that can be applied iteratively to build software. Both aspects hold promise for the design and development of intranets.
Last month, we presented the value chain of Web Services in order to shed some light on the different technical levels and roles of the players in this market. The adoption of Web services is going to be quick. The first practical application of Web Services has to be considered within the enterprise. For instance, using Web Service technologies to enhance your intranet may be a great opportunity.
What if you threw an intranet and nobody came? That was the problem facing Jeffrey Henning, cofounder and Chief Operating Officer for Perseus Development Corporation. Perseus's first attempt at an intranet, in 1998, was a failure, unused by the employees it was mean to serve. If at first you don't succeed, re-launch.
We've tested a number of solutions, and talked to vendors and clients to figure out the shape of the Web Services value chain. We have identified the following levels: Application Server Infrastructure; Standards; Web Services Server; Web Services Developers; and Web Services Marketers. This article explains what these levels mean.
Remember the icon Clara Peller with her "Where's the Beef" gig? It is in that same vein P.G. Daly asks, where's the documentation? She came upon this question more often than she would have liked recently.
The Institution of Engineers Australia is the largest and most diverse engineering association in Australia, with approximately 60,000 members. Like most professional associations, it provides a wide range of benefits, facilities and services to help its members achieve their personal and professional goals. As a member-funded organization, the IEAust needs to deliver these benefits and services efficiently, providing maximum benefit for the lowest cost.
It seems like just yesterday that software gurus were touting component technology as the key to code reuse, and code reuse as the Holy Grail of application development. Yet in the way of all things Internet, this approach, dominant for over a decade and the heart of every software product being offered today, is suddenly being challenged by a new development metaphor: Web Services.
Although far from P.G. Daly's favorite topic, document and content management is a key focus in the world of business today. In fact, at her day job she is currently working on a huge document management initiative that no matter how hard she tries she cannot extricate herself. With that in mind, what is document management anyway?
It's clear what's needed: a standard way (in XML, naturally) of representing threads. After all, threads are of unique importance to the Web. They give conversations their persistence. They are the fundamental way those conversations are organized. And they are unique to the new networked world; there's nothing in the real world that matches them precisely. Save the Threads!
Real World Intranets Part 2 Occidental Petroleum Health, Environment, and Safety Department: A Case Study By Troy Dreier
What to do when your intranet simply has too much information? When it contains research and reports from experts all around the world - and quick access to every page is crucial? That was the problem faced by William Dykes, the Director of Communications and Web Development for Occidental Petroleum.
This is the second in a series of five articles on the implementation of usability mythologies in the development of an intranet's information architecture. The series is based on a project developed for an educational institution. This article outlines the first stage of our user needs analysis.
An Internet Strategist, a Management Information Systems specialist who can solve business problems using new information technology, is an under used yet much-needed part of any contemporary business. No matter how you slice it, any company hoping to survive in the new economy needs someone who can best utilize technology. An Internet Strategist fills that role.
Web content quickly grows stale and becomes out-of-date. A new Internet category—Content Management (CM) solutions—allows business users across the organization to easily add or modify their own Web content without the assistance of the IT/Web staff. Additionally, CM solutions ensure that contributors adhere to company Web site standards while keeping security and navigational elements intact.
While the Web gives everyone the capability of becoming a database jockey and information retrieval specialist, the world in the mid-90s didn't decide that retrieving information is just the coolest thing ever and we have to wire the entire globe so everyone can do it. It took the other form of information: the joke.
E-Learning ranges from simple online orientation sessions for new employees to full-fledged certification programs. Although the term "e-Learning" can be broadly defined as the use of a network for the delivery of training and educational material, this delivery can occur in a number of ways. This articles defines these methods to help you decide which one is best for your organization.
Just as the invention of the automobile did for makers of horse-drawn carriages, the shift from traditional application development to software assembly is challenging assumptions about how people add value. Whether you suffer or prosper as a result will depend on how you adapt to the coming storm. Here are couple of broad trends you need to reckon with.
Outside the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, it was a rare fogless week. Inside, the 20,000 attendees, 350 exhibitors and 900 presenters at Sun's 2001 JavaOne(sm) conference guaranteed a different kind of fog would cloud the senses.
Content is definitely king: But how easy is it to develop content and applications that is compelling, regular and enticing? Users of the intranet look for significant content that decides whether they re-visit the site regularly or even at all.
"Bits are fictitious, At best they are "based on a true story." The same bit — say one that's put together with another 23 to determine the color of a particular pixel of a photo of Aunt Agnes — may be a pinch of magnetized iron on a hard drive, a pit in a CD, or a hole in a punch tape. When sent over the Net, the bit may then become a pulse of energy on a wire — or the lack of a pulse. But I have a toolbox full of electrical wires that lack a pulse, and not one of those lacks-of-a-pulse is a bit. All these things only become bits if a machine takes them as bits. Bits, unlike atoms, require an act of interpretation, just as marks in the sand can only become words as part of an interpretive context.
Despite clogged streets, bursting commuter trains and delayed flights, increasing numbers of people are reaching their workplaces faster and better rested than ever before. What seems a contradiction at first glance has a very simple explanation: Employees are working out of their home offices and have become telecommuters. Because of the dangers of being cut off from the rest of their co-workers, information portals that unite "insiders" and "outsiders" under one virtual roof have become crucial enablers of this new business culture.
This article presents Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2000. The range of tools covered by this label enables trading partners who wish to exchange documents (or more precisely, data) to integrate applications within B2B transactions. BizTalk Server 2000 is a tool used for the integration of partners' information systems. It uses a number of Microsoft tools to achieve this goal.
Intranets can be very expensive; and convincing your boss or CEO to shell out money for an intranet requires a persuasive argument. Rather than just building it with little or no care for the financial impacts or potential, more and more organizations are building intranet business cases and properly planning their intranet build in order deliver the desired return on investment. In part two of a two-part article on intranet return on investment (ROI), Intranet Journal explores the potential hard and soft investment benefits.
According to a recent agreement, eBay will make its underlying auction capabilities available to Microsoft's developers through the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). This isn't proof of the SOAP pudding, just one more indication that SOAP is a durn important puddin', even more so with the advent of UDDI.
It's not often that the most exciting thing about a product's new version is the price, but that's the case with NetObjects Fusion MX. The price has dropped like a rock: version 5.0 was $299, while this latest is only $99.95. Does this mean NetObjects' features have been drastically scaled back? Not at all.
An intranet site is only as good as its content. No matter how much form and function goes into the framework, it is the transfer of information that drives intranet success. Which is why intranet strategy - from conception, to implementation, to change - must revolve around the right content management technology and methodology.
This is the first in a series of five articles on the implementation of usability mythologies in the development of an intranet's information architecture. Usability has been a buzzword for Web sites for the last few years, and with good reason. Usability and User Centered design methodologies are crucial to the success of all Internet and intranet projects. Studies have shown that if fixing a usability problem is $1 in the discovery phase of your Web project, the cost of fixing that same problem post-implementation will be between $100 and $160!
Bits are fictitious, At best they are "based on a true story." When sent over the Net, a bit may become a pulse of energy on a wire — or the lack of a pulse. It's the duality of bits that make them useful. On the one hand, they are instantiated in physical, measurable ways so they can be manipulated by machines. On the other, they carry meanings we impose upon them, as when we determine that this bit will be part of the description of the color of a pixel in Aunt Agnes' lovely smile.
Because of new opportunities people can now be more selective in how and when they work and even whom they want to work for. As a result, Management will need to be more proactive and creative. Flextime is an Irish software company that thinks it has the key by which an employee's work life can be balanced with organizational priorities.
Look at what other successful intranets are doing and it might inspire you to develop your own intranet in different ways. In this series of real world case studies, we'll spotlight department intranets from a variety of successful companies. Read along to see how others are dealing with the same integration and collaboration issues that you yourself are facing.
The idea of a portal is hardly new — at least in Internet terms. But the term "Enterprise Information Portal" (EIP) causes confusion. This stems in part from the fact that so many different kinds of vendors with different backgrounds come at EIP from different directions. This article sorts it all out for you.
In the search for faster, easier ways to get Web applications online, the enterprise is following on the heels of Web site developers, ISPs, software developers, and other Internet companies. Because of its cross-platform portability, reliability, extensibility, and ease of use, many business enterprises are considering PHP for their preferred Web scripting language.
Although the title of this article is deliberately provocative, it is nonetheless worthwhile defining the role of the application server: "An application server provides an infrastructure and set of services that make it possible to serve applications using Internet-related technologies." We shall see how, out of the 40 vendors identified, there are not so many products in which it is really worth investing.
In the real world, the little interchange on some topic of the moment with someone you've never met would vanish like yesterday's breakfast. But in a world of digital communication and ever-cheaper hard drives, nothing vanishes.
Since version 4.1, subsequent GroupWise releases have added features and functions by the bucketload to the point where you start to wonder what else could be added. So, when I got my first chance to install and test the newest Novell offering, GroupWise 6, I had to ask myself a question: Besides folding in the functionality offered in the Enhancement Pack for 5.5, what else can have been added that would warrant a completely new release? The answers I found were many.
Macromedia's recent acquisition of Allaire was a milestone in the convergence of front- and back-end Web development. For the maker of Dreamweaver to absorb the creator of Cold Fusion recapitulates what the market has been saying for years: that sites need to be sexy and smart, and that developers need to be able to make them that way with a minimum set of tools. Macromedia's answer is Dreamweaver Ultradev, a hybrid page design and server-side scripting tool first released in early 2000.
As a product from Symantec Visual Café was for years one of the best Java development environments. Now it's in the fold of WebGain, Inc., and that's turning out to be a good thing, because Visual Café has become more accurately aimed at enterprise level, the Web and intranet applications.
Willy Brandt, former chancellor of Germany, summed up the globalization imperative nicely when he said, "When I am selling to you, I must speak English. But when you are selling to me, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen [you must speak German]." Whether you're trying to reach employees on a worldwide intranet, business partners on a global extranet or customers on an international storefront, nothing repels visitors faster than a Web site they can't understand.
WAP makes sense for the corporate intranet, but does that mean anyone is using it? In the last installment of this series, we looked at Advantage Sales & Marketing, a grocery sales and marketing firm, and its stalled plans for a wireless intranet for its sales staff. This time we planned to look at a successful wireless intranet…and boy, was it difficult to find one.
It’s no secret, intranets and corporate portals are expensive endeavors. Despite the expense, many organizations understand the implicit and explicit value of intranets and are ready to make notable investments. In the first part of a two-part article on intranet return on investment , we look at the challenge of justifying these investments.
Designing a Business Intelligence portal actually begins before you sit down at the computer and start creating the reports, queries, cubes, etc. that make up your business intelligence solution. Business Intelligence Portal design has five basic phases, which are defined in this article.
Will XHTML replace HTML? While some tag junkies may think so because they believe the universe is ultimately rational, there's not a chance if only because the first browser that refuses to show you an HTML page because it's not properly done in XHTML is the browser you'll throw off your desktop. But XHTML is very likely to become the standard for people creating Web pages for a living.
If your Internet/intranet applications rely heavily on database information-specifically from Oracle databases-then Oracle Corporation JDeveloper 3.2 can provide some unique advantages.
Over the past several years, industries around the world have been slowly warming up to the idea of e-Learning – a virtual "classroom" where the instructor and students may be scattered over continents. E-Learning can range from simple online orientation sessions for new employees to full-fledged certification programs.
For any given group of executives, the success and productivity of a videoconference can be attributed to a great deal of planning, and no small amount of luck. Data conferencing (a.k.a. web conferencing, document-sharing, application-sharing) is a technology that allows people to work successfully and more productively. Data conferencing allows a group of people to work, simultaneously, in real time, creating any number of electronically produced documents: reports, plans, proposals, spreadsheets, presentations.
Your Webmaster delivers the news that she is leaving for new challenges. Are you prepared? Do you have any clue whatsoever what she does? Have you had any cross training with other Web talent in your organization? For that matter, do you even have other web talent in your organization?
Wireless has been a buzzword for a little over a year now. In this short time, it has seen some of the industry's greatest technological progress (Wireless IP) and its most dramatic marketing flops (WAP over GSM), some of the biggest public crazes (i-Mode) and most crashing disappointments (WAP, again…). But it is still the word on everybody's lips today, and technologies like UMTS and GPRS look set to catapult Wireless into all our daily lives.
The problem is that though videoconferencing may really be the next best thing to being there, as anyone who has attended a business meeting can tell you, being there isn’t always that great. Enter Web conferencing.
If you heard about Ginger, inventor Dean Kamen's new invention, through the Internet, it was probably in an email from a friend that not only contained a link to an article elsewhere, but that also had your friend's commentary on it -- a guess, a witticism, a sneer. You got a "broadcast" message in the human voice of your friend. In other words, an example of the New Hyperlinked Order.
SOAP Toolkit 2.0 Beta 1 makes it possible to call services and publish them according to two Application Program Interface (API) levels: high or low. The choice will depend on the characteristics of the SOAP message that you wish to send or the level of monitoring of the service to be called. The purpose of this document is to explain precisely how Microsoft's SOAP Toolkit is used.
Storing and presenting information found on the Web can be done in a variety of ways. Many users of the Web are accustomed to the simple bookmarking process; however, the content located at the saved URL may change on a daily or a monthly basis. All of the products listed in this article attempt to help individuals do Web clippings in less than 10 minutes with various options to present content professionally to colleagues and clients.
Snippets Software provides solutions for the access, integration and delivery of enterprise information and applications. Based on agent technology, the Snippets platform collects, consolidates, integrates and analyzes information from multiple data sources, enterprise-wide applications and legacy systems, delivering to each user uniquely the information he or she needs.
We are now entering a pragmatic phase of SOAP deployment, which involves testing and checking the actual interoperability promised by the SOAP protocol. In this article, we present the results of a study that we carried out on the interoperability between the three main SOAP implementations, which are SOAP Toolkit 2.0 Beta 1 (Microsoft): C#, Visual Basic and any other language of the .NET platform, Apache SOAP (Jakarta Apache project): JAVA language, and SOAP::Lite (Paul Kulchenko): Perl language.
A few issues ago David Weinberger wrote and article called "The New Metaphysics of the Web." The article — an attempt to work out some issues that are important to a book I'm writing — draws a contrast between our traditional metaphysics that understands things in terms of their self-contained limits and the hyperlinked metaphysics of the Web that sees things more in terms their relationships. I use that basic idea to suggest that the Web ultimately is spiritual or transcendent. And then he recieved a response.
In the past, customers knew that the computers (boxes!) they bought were not going to run the company. Today — despite wishes to the contrary — they're realizing that the software they buy is not going to create applications. In the end, customers want results — not just applications that run on computers. How are these results delivered? Through the provision of services. We have seen the hardware and the software ages; now we have entered the service age.
In software design, coordinating the different technologies and layers necessary to keep up with today's heterogeneous Web-based development environments is a tough challenge, meaning that nowadays the notion of Software Architect really makes sense. But what tools and methods can we use to streamline the architecture design process?
Since access to intranets is restricted from public view, Vincent Flanders finds it interesting so many intranets share common design mistakes. He's grouped these design faux paus into something he calls the top ten intranet design mistakes.
The Web hasn’t been hyped enough. Beyond the numbers applied to the Web – the millions of users, the billions of email messages and the trillions of dollars – and beyond the endless, important discussions trying to predict the Net’s effect on our institutions, the Web is touching us in ways so deep and so personal that we might as well give in and call them spiritual.
So what is .NET? The term is, essentially, a new marketing label which Microsoft is sticking on existing and future products. The .NET label now features on server products such as BizTalk Server 2000 and Application Center 2000, which are based on Windows DNA 2000 technology. The most interesting feature of .NET, however, lies in the development platform, languages and protocols which it emphasizes.
Take our current world, viewed through common sense, and remove space and matter, and thus many of the laws of physics. Change the rules of the world and what was once common sense now makes no sense. That's why the Web is so puzzling so often. It's lacking common sense.
After the static Web came the dynamic Web, and this is now evolving towards an interactive Web (or "Web services"), completing tasks with many stages of execution, between different players connected to the network. Integration is still a problem.The solution resides in one simple, lightweight protocol: a protocol like the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
Ernst and Young, has put together the quintessential course for security engineers looking to improve their ability to protect their organization's website, intranet, systems, and network. Dubbed eXtreme Hacking, and carrying a price tag of $5,000 a slot, this course is for anyone but hacks.
Lexias has come up with a revolutionary new suite of user security products based on the no-time-for-training paradigm. With DigiVault™ and Lexiguard™ , if you can point, click, and type, you can secure and exchange data with the best of them.
Cooperation is defined as working together toward a common goal." Cooperative Computing is the set of technologies that enables individuals to maximize their ability to solve today’s most demanding business problems.
Perhaps the most exciting product released At Comdex last month, was the Identix DFR-300 Fingerprint Scanner. Implemented in Compaq, Dell, and Toshiba laptops, the hardware fingerprint scanners are packaged with BioLogon™ for Windows 2000 and features biometric identification and authentication, BIOS level security, single sign-on and multi-factor security.
"The Net is not like a brain!" I heard myself arguing with more vigor than I'd intended. Unfortunately, the person I chose to gainsay on this topic had been introduced as a hedge fund manager but turned out also to be a neuroscientist at the University of California's Brain Imaging Center. He knows the brain the way I know...well, I don't know anything as well as he knows the brain. You'd be surprised at how much I learned about the ways the Net is indeed like a brain.
The Web is enabling us, as a species, to invent new forms of discourse. This didn't use to happen all that often. Now it does. Inventing and discarding new ways of talking ... what could be cooler?
After months of hype, WAP seems to have fallen flat on its face... but does this reflect the outlook for mobile Internet as a whole? Not necessarily. We discuss the pros and cons of Wireless technology and look at where it's likely to head in the future.
About a year ago, one division of P.G Daly's company came to her with the problem of disseminating weekly sales reports. The problem was that they had about 60 sales people across 2 different sales forces (product lines) that had to submit sales reports to the corporate office on a weekly basis. These reports needed to be distributed to an audience of 40 or more people from regional sales managers to upper management. The process in place was to have everyone e-mail their weekly report (in a Microsoft Word Format that had a common template) to an Administrative Assistant who would photocopy and assemble packets that got sent through the regular inter-office mail. Needless to say, this occupied a good piece of this assistant's time the beginning of each week and wasn't the most timely distribution of information. This article shows how P.G. Daly and the company's Intranet came to the rescue.
"Build It, And They Will Come". It may have worked for Kevin Costner in the movie "Field of Dreams", but chances are this philosophy alone won't work for your company's Intranet.
Firewall technology has steadily steered itself towards turn-key appliance solutions in the last couple years. Though Veloci-Raptor is a late entrant into this market, the birth of this beasty box is going to give prior market entrants, including the CheckPoint based Nokia IP650, a run for the money. This article explains why.
In the past four sections of this series on The Wireless Intranet, we've looked at the programming languages and technical requirements you'll need to know in order to make your company's intranet accessible for field workers. Now it's time for a hard dose of reality. What could stop your wireless plans? Imperfect national coverage and competing standards, for a start.
An XML document is considered "well written" when its syntax is correct, and "valid" when it respects a document model. While a document must be "well written," it does not necessarily have to be "valid." However, as XML is a meta language, there are an infinite number of XML formats, and most XML documents should respect a particular document model, which can be defined in one of two ways: By a Document Type Definition (DTD); By an XML Schema. In this article, we are going to look at how you should go about implementing the former, using a DTD.
Truth is not enough. Knowledge is tribal. It has to be relevant to the tribe. It has to be expressed in the way appropriate to the tribe. It has to come from someone in the tribe or else it must be delivered in the way the tribe chooses to receive foreign ideas. David Weinberger explains why.
We are currently witnessing a veritable surge in technology: initially advocated as the Web for mobile phones at the beginning of 2000, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is now being discredited as impractical, useless, expensive and "proprietary." From Expansion (a French economic magazine) to Anchordesk, from the IETF to CNET.com, does everyone really agree that WAP should be abolished, that it has no future? At Netmedia 2000 in London, most of those who attended the conference described WAP as an "aberration." What does this mean? Has the hype cycle now fallen in step with "Internet time" and its ultra-short time scales?
Mapping the Web is a huge field that falls into two main pieces: maps that show us something interesting about the Web, and maps that help us navigate the Web. These two need
not be essentially connected.
Customer Driven Machining (CDM), a Minnesota component manufacturing company plans to reduce customer costs by 20 to 30 percent and product development time by months using IntraNet Solutions' Xpedio
With the signing of the electronic signature bill into law , we expect PKI and biometric products to gain momentum. The new law makes electronic signatures as legal and binding as pen-to-paper signatures. PKI stands for Public Key Infrastructure, and is a technology that is used to authenticate the origin, or owner, of a file or document through the use of both public and private keys. Biometrics is also a technology that is used to authenticate the origin, or owner, of data by using a form of personal identification such as an iris scan or fingerprint scan.
David Reed is an Internet "graybeard". We asked him about what others call "Reed's Law" which is based on the fundamental insight that the Net's value comes from its enabling of groups, not just of individual-to-individual connections.
IDM features a series of excerpts from this new guide to Intranet creation, maintenance and design. It's a useful tool for both beginners and experts alike.
Recently, a number of people have asked P.G Daly questions about directory structure for Intranets. Namely, what is the best way to structure folders and files for my site? This question is valid both in the macro sense of an entire Intranet as well as for each individual author creating their own little piece of the pie. So, she got to thinking about how effectively she set things up on her company's Intranet many moons ago. What does she recommend as good practices? What would she suggest avoiding?
An Enterprise Information Portal can transform the workplace, but be prepared for a struggle as good information architecture collides with the existing IT environment and corporate culture. Enterprise efforts can bog down. A limited functional or department deployment can serve as a test bed. Among the major concerns are: Existing Contracts; Metadata Matters; and Taxonomy--the Greatest Challenge.
Pramati, which means "exceptional spirit" in Indian, is a young company that was founded in 1997 by Java architects. They aim to offer an Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) development and deployment environment that rivals with the main players on the Java market such as BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere.
Every human vice we can imagine finds its way onto the Web, which seems to spur the world's most lurid imaginations even further. But the reason for this should be a cause for optimism.
The vastness of the Web gives advantage to those sites (Intranet and Internet) that are not just informative but also entertaining. This is because of the law of nature that says: We find interesting things interesting.
Dreamweaver succeeds in letting developers focus on design, without obscuring technical detail from those who want it. Could Macromedia possibly manage a similar feat in the more complex realm of data connectivity and server-side scripting? Remarkably, they have.
It took many years to get Universal Product Codes on all packaged goods so data can be entered into computers without the intervention of human fingers. But bar codes contain very little information -- a handful of digits (as is proper for a hand). Now, MIT has come up with a way to pack tons more information into a single bar code: make the stripes encode an address where more information can be found.
There's plenty of knowledge in your company. The problem is telling who has it. For example, you're at the big meeting to decide what to do about the coming Flannel Crisis that threatens the very marrow of your business. Maria says to lay in a supply. Germaine says to move to synthetic flannel. Oscar says to set fire to your competitors' warehouses. Frances excuses herself and goes to call her stock broker. Someone in the room undoubtedly is saying the truth. Someone has knowledge. But who?
Buzz words have been emerging at Internet speed. By the time you arrive at a conference, the conference chairperson is explaining why the buzz word in the title is obsolete. We barely have time to launder our new cool T shirts before its clever buzz word pun marks us as pathetic has-beens who don't Get It.
Mapping the Web is a huge field that falls into two main pieces: maps that show us something interesting about the Web, and maps that help us navigate the Web. These two need
not be essentially connected.
Truth is not enough. Knowledge is tribal. It has to be relevant to the tribe. It has to be expressed in the way appropriate to the tribe. It has to come from someone in the tribe or else it must be delivered in the way the tribe chooses to receive foreign ideas. David Weinberger explains why.
If 'knowledge Management' is serious about making tacit knowledge
explicit, it ought to be aware that there's a price
to be paid. A lesson of so much
poetry, from Horace to Joyce, is that there is
magnificence in the simple ... and that, therefore,
the explicit is the insignificant tip of the tacitly
significant.
Managing Knowledge: A
Practical Web-Based Approach Book shows how to evaluate intranet content
in the context of corporate goals, and then how to implement an
intranet-based knowledge management strategy that reflects these goals
and critical business processes.
In her
last column, P.G. Daly shared with you the key conclusions from her
recent Intranet survey. This time, she'd addresses the answers to the important
questions of -- What do users want to see? What would encourage them to
use the Intranet more often? And, most critical, what recommendations
and actions does she have planned to address some of the biggest issues?
The marriage of the
mobile phone and the Internet will never be as fruitful as analysts
predict unless a manageable and scalable end-to-end wireless security
system is adopted by mobile commerce vendors. Without such an
infrastructure, the mobile mantra will become the mobile dodo.
How Big 5 consulting
firms (Booz, Allen and Hamilton, Arthur Andersen, Ernst & Young and
KPMG) use intranets to manage their employees', and industry experts'
knowledge and what they can teach us.
After over 18 months
since the intranet was "officially rolled out", it was time to formally
ask users if they were using the intranet or not and to find out what
they found useful or useless as well as determine what would get them to
use it more. Here's how I asked went about sending out and intranet
survey and the type of feedback I received in return.
HTML comes up short
when it comes to today's new wireless technologies. XHTML 1.0
is the re-formulation of HTML 4.0 as an Extended Markup Language (XML)
application, but it remains compatible with all browsers that support HTML
4.0. XHTML performs
in two areas in which HTML proves quite limited: language
extensibility and portability.
Software vendors are
no longer the only source of technological innovation. Today, dot orgs
are also moving the industry forward. Once an OSS
has been released, its success depends on the number of users and
contributors it attracts from the critical mass. But here, basic market
rules apply: the OSS in question must meet a particular need and it must
be of good quality.
What technical skills does your organization need
to be successful? Surely the group needs a core of technical skills to do some
development and maintenance in-house, and to understand what systems are being implemented and how it all fits together.
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Managing Web Sites as Dynamic Business Applications
